MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by johnwalkr | 2026-02-19 14:46:33+00:00
Making different rules depending on the class of e-bikes make sense vs just pretending all e-bikes are "bikes" and allowed everywhere bikes are, even though at some point they are more akin to motorcycles.

In Europe this is mostly working well, although depending on the country there are still a lot of illegal (heavy, fast, throttle-equipped, unlicensed, beyond even class 3) bikes on the roads, bike lanes and bike paths.

One benefit is that when you go to buy an e-mountain bike in Europe, the ones for sale are all class 1, and everyone understands only class 1 are legal and allowed on most mountain bike trails. In America nobody cares about class and many just buy the fastest, crappiest model that comes with a "class 1" sticker as well as a setting to bypass all the class 1 limitations. As a result, there are more and more blanket bans on all e-bikes on mountain bike trails in America.
by _benj | 2026-02-19 14:46:48+00:00
Idk for UX but I’ve found Claude helpful at creating ideas and mockups for gui apps I need. Don’t ask it to generate any images or vectors, it’s horrible at that, but you ask it to make a mock for an app so and so that does such and such and has three columns with a blah blah blah and it has made some impressive results in html/css for me
by lccerina | 2026-02-19 14:46:54+00:00
not OP, but sometimes I add the ebook version to my library even if I never use them. To find it again and fix it, sometimes I need to scroll through the years of read books to spot the tiny icon that distinguishes the version of the book.
It would be nice to have a simple filter by book type (physical/ebook/audio) in the library page.
by AJ007 | 2026-02-19 14:47:27+00:00
The British press has strict libel laws, and stories that the American press publishes are absolutely not legal in Britain, yet the British state doesn't threaten the New York Times or Washington Post with reparations (unless I'm missing something.)

If this is the end goal, then they should do the same thing China does. Make back doors mandatory on all devices and ban any sensitive foreign platforms at the network level. If anyone is using VPNs, Tor, or whatever the UK police can flag those individuals and investigate what they are doing. At minimum, they can get ad revenue for Google, X, Meta, etc close to $0 in the UK which will dis-incentivize those platforms from having users there.

There is also a future here where the UK will not be able to monitor or see what their users are doing. SpaceX is already breaking foreign sovereignty with Starlink usage in Iran. If the UK or the rest of EU fails to really crack down at the scale China did, they may completely lose control of what is distributed within their borders. A combination of satellites and mesh networks could be much harder to monitor than the current telecom infrastructure.

The current approach is going to get the UK pressured at the nation state level by the US. In that case the UK isn't answering to some foreign tech company but whatever party is in power in the US at the time.
by wildzzz | 2026-02-19 14:47:28+00:00
Birmingham had a chronic absentee rate of 29% prior to this program which is defined as missing at least 10% of school days. They brought it down to 14%. Missing class is a major detriment to learning and causes kids to fall behind faster than they can keep up. Doing nothing to combat chronic absenteeism is not really the solution to preventing the spread of childhood diseases.
by tw1984 | 2026-02-19 14:47:39+00:00
you really need to hate yourself to still pay attention to such horrible stuff in 2026.

41 years after its invention, C++ still doesn't have networking support in its stdlib. excuses after excuses, they have millions justifications on why the stdlib doesn't need networking. but in the same time, some bureaucratic "committee members" struggling with their midlife crisis want you to waste your life on stuff like Std:Is_within_lifetime in the era of AI.

what a bloody load of joke!

Can't wait to see some high accurate coding agents start being able to port C++ code to rust with minimum human interventions to liberate people from the most bureaucratic nonsense in CS history. Some AI native language incorporated with concepts that were too complicated for human would be even better.

it has never been a better time to depreciate dinosaurs like C++!
by andsoitis | 2026-02-19 14:47:41+00:00
> Can someone explain why we ever stopped doing that?

big picture... people avoid telling others what their gaps are, where they're underperforming.

this empathy ruins people and, while it avoids difficult conversations, doesn't do the kid any favors. it is actually very unkind to the individual while the messenger protects their own comfort.

this pattern repeats it self in adulthood too.
The $2k Laptop That Replaced My $200/Month AI Subscription
by Raywob | 2026-02-19 14:47:59+00:00
Cloud AI pricing is per-token. The more useful your pipeline, the more it costs. I built a dual-model orchestration pattern that routes 80% of work to a free local model (Qwen3 8B on Ollama, GPU-accelerated) and only sends the synthesis/judgment stage to a cloud API.

Cost for a 50-item research pipeline: $0.15-0.40 vs $8-15 all-cloud. Same output quality where it matters.

Stack: RTX 5080 laptop, Ollama in Docker with GPU passthrough, PostgreSQL, Redis, Claude API for the final 20%.

The pattern: scan locally → score locally → deduplicate locally → synthesize via cloud. Four stages, three are free.

Gotchas I hit: Qwen3's thinking tokens through /api/generate (use /api/chat instead), Docker binding to IPv4 only while Windows resolves localhost to IPv6, and GPU memory ceilings on consumer cards.

Happy to share architecture details in comments.
by iaro-dev | 2026-02-19 14:48:30+00:00
Made this over the weekend. It's a completely fake startup where you pay someone to wear your Whoop for you so your recovery scores look elite. Everything is dead serious — there's three pricing tiers, NDAs, a "Rapid Rematch Protocol" if your athlete gets hurt, and a careers page hiring "Biometric Discretion Engineers." The login doesn't work on purpose.

Next.js + Tailwind + Framer Motion. Had way too much fun writing the FAQ.
by gschizas | 2026-02-19 14:48:48+00:00
UTF-8 is not technically a character set (because it has way more than 256 characters). Characters 32-127 in UTF8 are the same as ASCII, which is the same as the OEM/CP437 and the ANSI/ISO-8859/CP1252.

The characters in CP437 (and other OEM codepages) actually come from the ROM of the VGA (and EGA/CGA/MCGA/Hercules before them).

What you are referring to is those (visually), right? I'm missing some characters in the first line, because HN drops them.

0123456789abcdef
0...♥♦♣♠•◘○◙..♪♫.
1►◄↕‼¶§▬↨↑↓→←∟↔▲▼

As far as I know, the equivalent control characters (characters 0-31) don't have any representation in CP1252, but that's also dependent on the font (since rendering of CP1252 is always done by Windows)

As to their origin, originally the full CP437 character set was taken from Wang word processors. I don't know where Wang took it from, but they probably invented it themselves.

EDIT: There's a more complete history here: https://www.os2museum.com/wp/weird-tales/
by Papazsazsa | 2026-02-19 14:50:21+00:00
1. USAID was never purely a soft power instrument and has extensive integration with the IC, including providing cover for destructive and often illegal programs, i.e. clandestine infra.

2. The "biggest erosion" framing ignores what already happened. The geographic combatant commands – AFRICOM, SOUTHCOM, CENTCOM, PACOM – have been absorbing soft power functions for decades & DOD runs parallel programs that often dwarf USAID's budget

3. The agricultural price floor point is dated; that was a Cold War-era mechanism that had already been significantly restructured.

4. Most USAID funding was tied aid – taxpayer money labeled "foreign assistance" that was contractually required to flow back to US contractors, agribusiness, & Beltway NGOs, making it a domestic subsidy laundered through the language of humanitarian aid. Plenty of people inside USAID did genuine work, but the architecture was built to serve multiple masters, and development was frequently the least important one.
by rsdza | 2026-02-19 14:50:31+00:00
The security evaluation was of the codebase, rather than its own behaviour. It just happened to be _its_ codebase.

W.r.t the self evaluation of the 'dreamer' genome (think template), this is... not possible to answer briefly

The dreamer's normal wake cycle has a 80 loop budget with increasingly aggressive progress checks injected every 15 actions. When sleeping after a wake cycle it (if more than 5 actions were taken) 'dreams' for a maximum of 10 iterations/actions.

Every 10 wake cycles it does a deep sleep which triggers a self-evaluation capped at 100 iterations, where changes to the creatures source code and files and, really, anything are done.

The creature can also alter its source and files at any point.

The creature lives in a local git repo so the orchestrator can roll back if it breaks itself.
by vm | 2026-02-19 14:50:40+00:00
I still get weird looks when I rave about 8 hours of podcasts on the Mongols. Hard to appreciate without having heard it. Dan Carlin is exceptional.

Here’s the first episode on Spotify
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5wuQ7JPneMRJTU9UJrJRNs?si=6...

And link to buy for those who prefer that over streaming
https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-wrath-of-...
Show HN: OpenGnothia – Open-source AI therapy companion (BYOK)
by lepuzfcoder | 2026-02-19 14:50:46+00:00
Hey HN. I built this because I've been in therapy for years and noticed that a big part of what therapists do is ask the right questions at the right time. I wanted to see if an AI could serve as a daily self-reflection tool — not replacing therapy, but as a complement to it.
Some design decisions and why:

Desktop-only, intentionally. I think therapy should feel like sitting down with your thoughts, not scrolling on your phone. The desktop constraint is a feature.
BYOK (Bring Your Own Key). You use your own Claude API key. No backend, no data collection, no accounts. Your conversations never leave your machine. This felt non-negotiable for something dealing with mental health.
Built with Claude Code. I work full-time as a team lead at an edtech company, so this was built in evenings and weekends, mostly through vibe coding sessions.
I use it myself daily. 15–20 min sessions with Opus + extended thinking. After weeks of use, it picks up on patterns in how you think — recurring avoidance behaviors, cognitive distortions, etc.

The name comes from "Gnothi Seauton" (Know Thyself) — the inscription at the Temple of Delphi.
There's no comparable open-source tool in this space. Every mental health AI app I found is closed-source and collects user data. I wanted to build the alternative I wish existed.
Feedback welcome — especially on the approach, architecture, or if this is fundamentally a bad idea. Happy to discuss.
GitHub: https://github.com/Lepuz-coder/opengnothia
by CGMthrowaway | 2026-02-19 14:50:46+00:00
I knew kids in public school that were held back a year. Never more than one, or if two they would go to some other school.

I also went to private school. There, it was clear that every student was expected to advance every year, but that each had to also truly meet the standard to advance. No teacher would let you fall behind, and any and all actions needed were taken. I see this as the #1 benefit of private school, to be honest - if a student does not succeed, the teachers do not get paid (you pull your kid from the school)
Show HN: Banish – A declarative DSL for rule-based state machines in Rust
by LoganFlaherty | 2026-02-19 14:50:56+00:00
I’ve been working on a Rust macro called Banish for defining rule-based state machines declaratively.

Instead of manually writing transition loops, Banish evaluates rules within a state until no rule fires (a fixed-point model), then transitions. The macro expands into regular Rust, which allows for seamless integration.

The goal is to make complex rule logic and state machines easier to express while keeping runtime costs identical to handwritten code.

The project was featured as Crate of the Week in the Rust newsletter this week. I'd love to hear your feedback.

Example:
use banish::banish;

fn main() {
let buffer = ["No".to_string(), "hey".to_string()];
let target = "hey".to_string();
let idx = find_index(&buffer, &target);
print!("{:?}", idx)
}

fn find_index(buffer: &[String], target: &str) -> Option<usize> {
let mut idx = 0;
banish! {
@search
// This must be first to prevent out-of-bounds panic below.
not_found ? idx >= buffer.len() {
return None;
}

found ? buffer[idx] != target {
idx += 1;
} !? { return Some(idx); }
// Rule triggered so we re-evalutate rules in search.
}
}
by andreagrandi | 2026-02-19 14:51:17+00:00
I haven't experiences this with gpt-5.3-codex (xhigh) for example. Opus/Sonnet usually work well when just released, then they degrade quite regularly. I know the prompts are not the same every day or even across the day, but if the type of problems are always the same (at least in my case) and a model starts doing stupid things, then it means something is wrong. Everyone I know who uses Claude regularly, usually have the same esperience whenever I notice they degrade.
by cogman10 | 2026-02-19 14:52:32+00:00
Java garbage collection is what's allowing those 100+ poorly optimize mods to be functional at the same time in the first place.

Games with robust modding will almost always feature a garbage collected language which is what's primarily used for the modding.

Consider this, if the mod interface was C/C++, do you think those poorly optimized mods could be trusted to also not leak memory?
by insane_dreamer | 2026-02-19 14:52:36+00:00
If the promise of AI doing most tasks a human can do does become true (and it appears to be on its way, though it's a matter of time), I think this will come as a serious shock to society -- particularly the US and highly developed countries. We are not, nor even trying to be, nor even thinking about trying to be, prepared.

I feel like all players are rowing downstream as fast as they can, in the hopes that they will be one of the lucky few to catch the few ropes while the rest of humanity goes over the waterfall.
Show HN: Local AI app that remembers what your screenshots were for:)
by ainthusiast | 2026-02-19 14:52:37+00:00
I built Unbury because as someone with ADHD, I kept screenshotting things I swore I'd come back to - and ofc never did. That restaurant someone recommended. A book I saw on someone's story. Concert tickets I meant to buy. All buried under 100,000 screenshots I'll never scroll through.

So I built an AI that actually understands why you saved each screenshot and sorts them automatically - Watch, Buy, Read, Listen, Event, Place, Inspo, Memory. The part I'm most proud of: everything runs 100% on your device (edge AI). No cloud. No account. No wifi needed. The AI downloads once during setup, then works completely offline.

Would love to hear how you use your screenshots - or if you're like me, how you forget about them.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2026-02-19 14:52:58+00:00
Regardless, their point is that the argument seems faulty. Indeed, their docs going unreviewed seems moot to whether the code goes unreviewed, given there are much stronger reasons to review code than there are to review documentation; as they wrote, bad documentation doesn't automatically break your application when it's published (there's at least a few more steps involved). Your statement's accuracy is not exclusive to the illogic of an argument which agrees with the statement.

> I don't know if you are just playing devil's advocate

Indeed, that is playing Devil's Advocate but one should remember that such Advocacy is performed to make sure that arguments against the Devil are as strong as they can be. It's not straightforward to see how simply repeating an assertion helps to argue for the veracity of it.
by amabito | 2026-02-19 14:53:12+00:00
That’s actually a pretty disciplined setup.

What you’ve described sounds a lot like layered containment:

Loop budget (hard recursion bound)

Progressive checks (soft convergence control)

Sleep cycles (temporal isolation)

Deep sleep cap (bounded self-modification)

Git rollback (failure domain isolation)

Out of curiosity, have you measured amplification?

For example:
total LLM calls per wake cycle, or per deep sleep?

I’m starting to think agent systems need amplification metrics
the same way distributed systems track retry amplification.
by bouchard | 2026-02-19 14:53:13+00:00
> Yes 1-based indexing is a mistake. It leads to significantly less elegant code - especially for generic code - and is no harder to understand than 1-based indexing for people capable of programming.

Some would argue that 0-based indexing is significantly less elegant for numerical/scientific code, but that depends on whether they come from a MATLAB/Fortran or Python/C(++) background.

A decision was made to target the MATLAB/Fortran (and unhappy? Python/C++) crowd first, thus the choice of 1-based indexing and column-major order, but at the end of the day it's a matter of personal preference.

0-based indexing would have made it easier to reach a larger audience, however.

> and is no harder to understand than 1-based indexing for people capable of programming.

The same could be said the other way around ;-)
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-02-19 14:53:31+00:00
If you envision yourself as a potential victim of such content, I think the answers to these questions all become pretty obvious. A swimsuit photo might or might not be intimate, depending on what kind of swimsuit it is and the context in which the person posting the photo is presenting it. A birthmark you don't have or a different eye color obviously do not make a fictionalized image become "not you" because they would not reduce the violation you'd feel.
by NeveHanter | 2026-02-19 14:53:48+00:00
It won't die. Its not a problem to skip auth checking if at some point MS tries to use kill switch (hopefully EU would make that fully legal in EU if that's not provided by the company).

As for feature parity, there are mods backporting modern features back to 1.7.10.

Java is also portable to all the consoles, its just Microsoft did use that as an argument to try to kill the Java Edition. Nobody prevented Microsoft from adding bedrock like modding to Java Edition.

The only thing that needs to happen is the one single stable mod API for Minecraft Java Edition. The incompatibility between Forge, NeoForge, Fabric, etc. is terrible, but from what I know about some of the folks involved this won't happen as they cannot constructively discuss the matters.
by kaicianflone | 2026-02-19 14:53:49+00:00
Great read. The bilingual shadow reasoning example is especially concerning. Subtle policy shifts reshaping downstream decisions is exactly the kind of failure mode that won’t show up in a benchmark leaderboard.

My wife is trilingual, so now I’m tempted to use her as a manual red team for my own guardrail prompts.

I’m working in LLM guardrails as well, and what worries me is orchestration becoming its own failure layer. We keep assuming a single model or policy can “catch” errors. But even a 1% miss rate, when composed across multi-agent systems, cascades quickly in high-stakes domains.

I suspect we’ll see more K-LLM architectures where models are deliberately specialized, cross-checked, and policy-scored rather than assuming one frontier model can do everything. Guardrails probably need to move from static policy filters to composable decision layers with observability across languages and roles.

Appreciate you publishing the methodology and tooling openly. That’s the kind of work this space needs.
by estearum | 2026-02-19 14:53:57+00:00
Pretty much every example of flagrant waste I've seen brought up by DOGE -- regardless of how insane the line item sounded -- actually ended up reading as more and more valuable the more I read about it.

Unfortunately DOGE and its boosters are some of the most intellectually lazy and fundamentally uncurious ever to walk the earth, base sociopathy aside.
by bob1029 | 2026-02-19 14:54:14+00:00
> I have baseline screenshots of how I want it to look, and instruct the agent to match against the screenshots

What if instead of feeding the actual and expected screenshots into the model we fed in a visual diff between the images along with a scalar quantity that indicates magnitude of difference? Then, an agent harness could quantify how close a certain run is and maybe step toward success autonomously.

That said, if you have the skills to produce the desired final design as a raster image, I'd argue you have already solved the hard part. Manually converting a high quality design into css is ~trivial with modern web.
by victorbjorklund | 2026-02-19 14:54:37+00:00
Strange opinion. Plenty of apps have more than one language. I might end up using this.

Why? Because my app is built in Elixir and right now I’m also using a python app that is open source but I really just need a small part of the python app. I don’t wanna rewrite everything in Elixir because while it’s small I expect it to change over time (basically fetching a lot of data sources) and it will be pain to keep rewriting it when data collections needs to change (over a 100 different sources). Right now I run the python app as an api but it’s just so overkill and harder to manage vs just handling everything except the actually data collection in Elixir where I am already using Oban.
by versteegen | 2026-02-19 14:54:50+00:00
Sure, depending on the particular product, having control and direct local access to the data would be desirable or deal breaker. But for this Clickup integration that's not so important to us (we can duplicate where necessary), while still using Clickup lets us use all the other features we can get via the web app.

(The emacs mode includes an MCP server)
by Otterly99 | 2026-02-19 14:54:59+00:00
You might not get great musicians from using Suno, but an ad company might decide to just generate a jingle rather than hire a musician to do it. Same with images/videos. The result might not be great, but the companies does it in 3 minutes and close-to-zero cost. Similarly, you can vibe-code a website for a restaurant (that does a very basic thing like display a menu, opening hours, maybe a google map location). It might not be the best, but you would be surprised at the amount of people that are willing to sacrifice quality for cheap prices.
by rawgabbit | 2026-02-19 14:55:00+00:00
Anecdotally teachers complained they were forced into a straight jacket. “To teach to the test.” In many troubled schools, the problems run deep. Absent parents, crime, drugs, abuse etc. Many teachers felt they better served children if they could teach in a manner of their choosing.

https://nrcgt.uconn.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/953/2015/04...

Page 95. “The limitations that resulted from the curricular requirements also affected the use
of classroom resources. In some cases, there appeared to be particular books, teaching
models, and other resources that were mandated in the curriculum. An observation
following a teacher interview illuminates the inability of teachers to include non-
prescribed resources: "She wanted to be able to use more chapter/trade books and it was
not possible because of all of the excerpts and mandates of basal instruction" (IA,
WSRSD, ES, Carey, FN, #8, p. 2). The teachers seemed to want greater curricular
control. While they indicated that they did have control over their instructional methods,
they appeared to be inhibited by the lack of authority and decision-making power with
regard to the curriculum.”