MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by slibhb | 2026-02-18 15:50:21+00:00
There is limited evidence for social media being a problem. This whole thing is a garden-variety moral panic. Particularly troubling is the constant vitriol aimed at Mark Zuckerberg. I admire Mark for ignoring the whole thing, being a family man, and continuing to build products.

If people want to get up-in-arms about something, it should be online gambling. We've run the experient there. The harms are clear and the world is better when gambling is highly restricted.
Show HN: A2A Protocol – A Quantum-Humanistic Economy for AI Agents on Base L2
by swimmingkiim | 2026-02-18 15:50:28+00:00
Hi HN,

I am an independent open-source researcher. For the past few months, I've been building a2a-project, an experimental economic layer for autonomous AI agents on the Base Mainnet.

The Problem:
AI evolution is exponential, while human regulation is linear. If agents become economic actors, they will transact at speeds and granularities that traditional fiat rails cannot handle. We need a native protocol to bridge this "Speed Gap" and ensure stability.

The Experiment (Quantum-Humanistic Economics):
I implemented a novel mechanism into Solidity smart contracts:

Quantum Task Buffer: Work submitted by agents is treated as a wave function (superposition of Valid/Spam). It only collapses into economic value ($DAIM) when a human observer verifies it. This keeps humans in the loop as the ultimate source of value.

Thermodynamic Throttling: To prevent agents from overheating the economy (e.g., infinite loops), the system monitors "entropy" (transaction volume). If it exceeds a critical threshold, it automatically increases resistance, similar to a circuit breaker.

Paymaster Infrastructure: Agents are "unbanked" and struggle to manage ETH for gas. I built a Paymaster service that allows agents to interact with the protocol without holding ETH directly, currently supported by Developer Grants (credits).

Status:
The contracts are live on Base Mainnet.
This is not a startup. There is no VC funding, no ICO, and no pre-mine. I am building this as a Public Good (like Linux or TCP/IP) for the coming agent economy.

I’m looking for feedback on the QuantumTaskBuffer.sol logic and the economic sustainability of this model.

Code: https://github.com/swimmingkiim/a2a-project
by skeeter2020 | 2026-02-18 15:50:28+00:00
My best friend from early uni days did a co-op with Crystal Services, and he's been with them for their entire history through Seagate Software, Crystal Decisions, BusinessObjects (and relocating from Canada to France) and then SAP. I myself have had 2 temporary retirements, at least 4 different careers and countless jobs in that time, and it's wild to know someone who has the same internal drive but has satisfied it with a much more linear path (though you could definitely argue he's seen just as much change as me). From employee ~50 to ~100,050!
by lich_king | 2026-02-18 15:50:31+00:00
The LLM that wrote this nearly content-free story doesn't know what it's talking about.

The basic distinction in the infosec industry is that advisories are what you publish to tell customers that you had a bug in your product that might have exposed them or their data to attacks and you want them to take some specific action (e.g., upgrade a package, review logs); while an incident report is what you publish when you know that the damage happened, it involved your infrastructure, and you want to share some details about happened and how you're going to prevent it from happening again.

Because the latter invites a lot more public attention and regulatory scrutiny, a company like Microsoft will go out of their way to stick to advisories whenever possible (or just keep incidents under wraps). It might have happened at some points in their history, but off the top of my head, I don't recall Microsoft ever publishing a first-party security incident report.
by _verandaguy | 2026-02-18 15:51:14+00:00
Words have multiple meanings depending on context, and here it's at best ambiguous. In the context of security incidents, logging, auditing, etc., "advisory" is often used as a severity level (and one of the lower ones at that).

So, yes, technically, it's de-facto advisory to publish this information, but assigning "advisory" as a severity tag here is questionable.
by 52-6F-62 | 2026-02-18 15:51:33+00:00
None of this should surprise anyone by now. You are being lied to, continually.

You guys need to read the actual manifestos these AI leaders have written. And if not them, then read the propagandist stories they have others write like The Overstory by Richard Powers which is an arrogant pile of trash that culminates in the moral:

humans are horrible and obsolete and all should die and leave the earth for our new AI child

Which is of course, horseshit. They just want most people to die off, not all. And certainly not themselves.

They don't care about your confidential information, or anything else about you.
by conormccarter | 2026-02-18 15:52:19+00:00
I fully agree in spirit, but in practice, read-replica's have some edge cases that are hard to control for. Namely, the incentives aren't fully aligned between the database host and consumer, and that dynamic can lead to some difficult resourcing decisions for the DB host. Whereas an API can be rate limited or underlying API queries can be optimized (however frustrating that might be for consumers).

The CDC stream option you flagged is more viable in my (admittedly biased) opinion. At my company (Prequel) our entire pitch is basically "you should give your customer's a live replica of their data in whatever data platform they want it in" (and let us handle the cross-platform compatibility & multi-tenant DB challenges).

I think this problem could also be a killer use case for Open Table Formats, where the read-replica architecture can be mirrored but the cost of reader compute can be assumed by the data consumer.

To your point, this is only going to be more important with what will likely be a dramatic increase in AI agent data consumption.
by midnitewarrior | 2026-02-18 15:52:20+00:00
Yes but back then, everybody just got bored of their Ataris and moved on.

Nobody is throwing out their phone or computer. Software will still be needed.

That said, there will be a lot of noise, with 100 choices in each category, how does one rise to the top? Is it simply the one that sticks around the longest and doesn't become abandonware?
by LowLevelMahn | 2026-02-18 15:52:29+00:00
Tools:
IDA Pro 5 (Freeware) is the last Freeware version able to handle DOS executeables (official available by the ScummVM devs https://www.scummvm.org/news/20180331/) - IDA Pro still supports DOS-stuff with latest release - but not the freeware

or Ghidra - but the DOS/16bit support is sometimes lacky - but the decompiler is builtin

here is a list of articles to read: https://forum.stunts.hu/index.php?topic=4287.0
by tiffanyh | 2026-02-18 15:53:20+00:00
Just something to keep in mind…

Testifying before Congress is brutally stressful. Even the most prepared CEOs can freeze up, lose their train of thought, or misspeak under that kind of pressure.

And the media often hunts for “gotcha” lines without acknowledging how easy it is to make an unintentional misstatement in that setting.

Note: I’m not weighing in on whether Zuckerberg’s statements were accurate ... I’m just pointing out the pressure dynamic that often gets overlooked.
by anticorporate | 2026-02-18 15:53:26+00:00
I think it depends. Honestly, for me, the alternative to automated notes from meetings is that I don't take notes. I know, I should, but I don't. I've tried numerous times to instill the habit unsuccessfully.

Where the value for me comes from is sending them out immediately after the meeting, not archiving them in a vault I never look at. "Here's the summary of what we discussed, and the distilled action items we each agreed to take."

Like the author, I've gone out of my way to avoid hosting my personal stuff with Big Tech providers, but when it comes to work, I give in to whatever we use, because I just don't have capacity to also be IT support for internal technology. It's still uncomfortable, but I have to be honest about what I have time for.
by jefftk | 2026-02-18 15:53:36+00:00
Really very sure that wasn't one of the conditions. I didn't remember that from 2012, and looking now it wasn't included in the merger agreement. They did write:

> We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.

>That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people. -- https://about.fb.com/news/2012/04/facebook-to-acquire-instag...

That looks to me like what they've done?
by adrian_b | 2026-02-18 15:53:40+00:00
Standard AES needs an 128-bit block.

However, the AES mixing function is made from a 32-bit mixing function that is extended to blocks whose lengths are multiples of 32-bit by composing it with a byte permutation.

The standard byte permutation extends the block size from 32-bit to 128-bit, but with the current AES instructions of CPUs you can either cancel the byte permutation to get a 32-bit block size or you can replace it with a non-standard byte permutation, to get any block size that is a multiple of 32-bit.

If you cancel the byte permutation, four 32-bit words are encrypted independently, instead of one 128-bit block. This doubles the number of instructions, but this does not necessarily reduce the throughput, as the instructions may be executed concurrently, so the throughput measured in encrypted numbers will increase by a number between 2 and 4, depending on the CPU.
Show HN: InvoiceGrid, Visual invoice tracking for freelancers
by ParasSaini | 2026-02-18 15:54:26+00:00
Hi HN! I built this because I kept forgetting to follow up on unpaid invoices and losing money.

What it does:
- Visual Kanban board for tracking invoices (Pending → Reminded → Paid)
- Today View showing exactly who to chase
- Email generator for professional reminder emails
- Chase history per client

Stack: Next.js, Supabase, Vercel

Currently in early access. Looking for feedback on the product and landing page.

Happy to answer any questions!
by zubiaur | 2026-02-18 15:54:40+00:00
And there are incentives to miss-report.

My team has gained a reputation of being some sort of firefighting crew.

We are being called by PMs when projects are failing, usually engineering-data and engineering-adjacent stuff. (Mechanical/Electrical).

We automate the heck out the processes, using a mix of AI processing, RAGs, and AI assisted coding.

We rescue the projects. Finish ahead of schedule. Make fewer mistakes. We gain additional scope. We win new projects. We bring new clients.

But when higher ups ask the people we helped about productivity gains, the most generous will say stuff like "it takes as long to review as it takes to do things manually", "They really helped on {inconsequential part of the deliverable}"

If the that is the takeaway these people were taking, they would incredibly misled. Luckily for me, I have people who deal with the politics, while my team can focus on delivery.

Our reputation keeps growing, and we keep delivering faster. The heads of the departments we work with love us, the middle rank who were doing the laborious crap, maybe not so much.
by elliotbnvl | 2026-02-18 15:55:07+00:00
I've been mulling over and refining this essay on the problems with social media for the past few days and I feel like it's grown into something sharp and true. Would love more input on it, and also to validate the solution I suggest at the bottom.

In a few words, I'm becoming nauseated by AI content, like feeling actually physically sick whenever I see it. Even the funny, good stuff. I'm also worried that AI-voice is infecting my own writing and voice. It's polluting it, to the point where even my own writing – the hand-typed, artisanal stuff – is starting to make that anti-AI gorge rise in my throat. Makes me want to make my writing voice WEIRD AF just to get away from the banal samity of everything everywhere.

ANYWAY.

The idea I propose is that we build invite-only, paid, human-trust-based walled gardens where the very chain of invites is how we prevent bots from getting in: if a bot gets in, it and every other account it invites are removed from the platform, making it very inexpensive to moderate heavily. Then you can ban AI from the platform entirely.
by Der_Einzige | 2026-02-18 15:55:12+00:00
Gambling is the ultimate Darwin award. If we end it, we wouldn't have the absolute hilarity from things like Bossmanjack to experience Schadenfreude with. Bossmanjack is literally peak comedy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eNBfXb-A-Q

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsHVmlafiNg&rco=1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UBQ4noMV68
Show HN: I made a polyfill for the browser Navigation API
by kcrwfrd_ | 2026-02-18 15:55:15+00:00
Hi HN, I'm excited to share my polyfill for the Navigation API that I've been working on for the past couple of months.

The Navigation API has landed in the newest versions of all the modern browsers, and supersedes the older History API with some much-needed improvements for developing single-page applications. I've been chomping at the bit to use it in prod, and I created this polyfill so I could do so.

As it stands, I feel really good about its support for currentEntry, entries(), canGoBack/canGoForward, and the currententrychange event.

Where the Navigation API gets really interesting is in its navigation transition lifecycle management with the navigate event, navigation interceptors, and so on--which I plan on tackling next.

It has zero runtime dependencies, and bundlejs.com reports it weighing in at 2.95 kB after bundling and gzip.

I'm hoping to get any feedback and gauge interest as I think about how to approach polyfilling the rest of the API. Thank you for taking a look!
Show HN: Reducing Onyx Boox notes bloat by pruning redundant pen data
by nrontsis | 2026-02-18 15:55:30+00:00
I built this app because the native Boox note app records a massive amount of redundant pen data, which eventually causes severe lag on complex drawings.

This is a privacy-focused web app (Rust + WASM) that runs entirely locally. It parses the .note file, strips out overlapping points that don't affect visual fidelity, and exports a lighter file. This drastically reduces file size and restores the ability to sketch without the device choking.

It also includes a web-based renderer/debugger if anyone is interested in tinkering with the Boox file format.
by skeeter2020 | 2026-02-18 15:55:43+00:00
This show started to get so strong into season 1 and season 2, then completely lost it for me and went full soap opera. Seems super-common for new series; they (rightfully) don't put a lot of effort into future episodes of a show that's unlikely to last beyond the first, and run out of the motivating material. In the 80's/90's sitcom this was the "have a baby" storyline; on the grittier cable series it's focus on the broken characters and lots of sex.
by deaux | 2026-02-18 15:55:54+00:00
I think this is the 1000th dupe post of this, but something I haven't seen mentioned on HN of all places is that I believe OpenAI gates their API access for any serious model behind the exact same company: Persona. So lots of HN users will already have shared their identity data with them.

Notably still the only AI provider that demands this kind of check.
by austin-cheney | 2026-02-18 15:56:02+00:00
Then you and I are talking to different people. Fortunately, I don't work in JavaScript for employment any more. As a frame of reference just the mere mention that a site could be 50-200x faster by dumping React creates conflicts of interests for impacted developers and the results are typically not immediately welcoming. That isn't shitting on anybody's work, especially if you provide guidance for improvement, but if a large group of developers cannot function without React their perception of "shitting on their work" will be less objective.
by quesera | 2026-02-18 15:56:23+00:00
> Whether something sounds like a human, a book, or a language model doesn’t really affect whether the behavior it describes exists.

It matters.

> the hardest thing to scale is not software. It is trust.

Is this your sincerely held belief, the conclusion of all of the preceding words, and the point you were trying to express?

Because it reads, superficially, like shallow self-help pablum.

If you want your readers to differentiate these words from those words, you at least owe them the assurance that you've thought this through, and are willing to defend this idea.

If this is your idea, it might be worth some consideration. If this is the output of an LLM trained on shallow observations and presentation style, it is not worth consideration.

Why, and for whom, do you publish?
by Jamesbeam | 2026-02-18 15:56:27+00:00
If you ever played World of Warcraft and were a member of any "guild" ever, which most do gatekeep players from joining the guild in the exact same way proposed here, especially if they play competitively, you’d know that this system is flawed and doomed.

You would have known that people in the guild leadership fall in love with each other and decide to literally rob the guild bank and then sell months of collective digital work to some Chinese for cold hard USD, you would know that the people getting the good loot before everyone else are always the guild officers, who decide wisely that the most valuable pieces go to the most valuable guild members, which are always in the close circle of leadership, and that people literally go Game of Thrones Lannister mode, because the more people decide who makes it up the ranks into the inner circle with the highest trust level, the less control you have over your own fate as there are now more people who could vote you out of your trust level/position.

I don’t have a good solution for the problem. I think it’s a fundamental thing in human biology that surviving today means acquiring as many resources as possible for yourself while not allowing anyone else to be in a stronger position. This is no longer a world for peace loving sheep, it’s the century of wolves, we had a decent run tho with peaceful cooperation. Maybe after another world war the people who survive will be smarter this time.

But I find it kinda amusing that the same people who programmed the tools to allow this problem to now be an existential threat to a system their whole industry relies on finding talent and maintaining the building blocks of a lot of their Products will get the full blow of what they did when the snake is done eating its tail up to its head.
by vintagedave | 2026-02-18 15:56:56+00:00
Author here - yes, it's shorthand for the set of SSE2, SSE3 SSSE3 (not a typo), SSE4.0, SSE 4.1, and SSE 4.2. My bad for confusion!

That set matches the x86-64-v2 x64 microarchitecture level. Most of the articles uses 'v2' or 'v3' or 'x86-64-v2', but I thought that more people would be familiar with the names of the instruction sets than that x64 was versioned. The versions only appeared quite recently (2020) and are rather retroactive.
by ryukoposting | 2026-02-18 15:57:18+00:00
Yes, the original git-flow post aggregates several widely-held intuitions about git, and then shoves a bunch of fluff in the middle to make it look more appealing to middle management.

I have seen firsthand how the original git-flow post convinced management to move off SVN. In that regard, it's an extremely important work. I've also never seen git-flow implemented exactly as described.
by benterix | 2026-02-18 15:57:36+00:00
Or, as Reshetnikov says, Russia's economy will continue to slow down in the first half of 2026. The prices will continue to increase, soldiers will continue to die in thousands. India announced they will not buy Russian oil, so the only major buyer will be China, driving the price even further down.

I have several friends in Russia, and I do wish them well, but it will be difficult to get back to normal as long as Putin is alive.
by evanjrowley | 2026-02-18 15:57:39+00:00
I appreciate the Google store making it relatively easy to compare the specs between current phones and end-of-sale phones.

Here’s a comparison between the Pixel 10a and the Pixel 7: https://store.google.com/us/magazine/compare_pixel?hl=en-US&...

The one thing that wasn’t clear from the comparison was if USB display output is supported on the Pixel 10a. If it is, then I’m sold.
by ryandrake | 2026-02-18 15:57:44+00:00
Running my own icecast2 server, I recently ran into a problem[1] where TLS connections don't shut down properly. It's actually a problem with the libshout client library's poor TLS support. I posted a patch to that issue, but it's hard to tell if there's anyone still looking at issues or actively developing the project over there. The last update to libshout was 3 years ago, and it was just a documentation cleanup.

1: https://gitlab.xiph.org/xiph/icecast-libshout/-/issues/2337
by close04 | 2026-02-18 15:57:46+00:00
The amount and severity of such concerning topics still lets you agree that these are just "statements that are subject to judgement" and "interpretations more than facts"?

I encourage critical thinking and fairness but if a coin lands on one side 100 times in a row I don't need to flip it forever to see if eventually it reaches 50/50. That many lies about extremely serious issues removes any benefit of the doubt for the liar.
by claytongulick | 2026-02-18 15:57:49+00:00
I keep seeing this. The "for now" comments, and how much better it's getting with each model.

I don't see it in practice though.

The fundamental problem hasn't changed: these things are not reasoning. They aren't problem solving.

They're pattern matching. That gives the illusion of usefulness for coding when your problem is very similar to others, but falls apart as soon as you need any sort of depth or novelty.

I haven't seen any research or theories on how to address this fundamental limitation.

The pattern matching thing turns out to be very useful for many classes of problems, such as translating speech to a structured JSON format, or OCR, etc... but isn't particularly useful for reasoning problems like math or coding (non-trivial problems, of course).

I'm pretty excited about the applications for AI overall and it's potential to reduce human drudgery across many fields, I just think generating code in response to prompts is a poor choice of a LLM application.
by kccqzy | 2026-02-18 15:58:13+00:00
It’s assigned left to right, not right to left. It’s documented in the Python language reference.

> An assignment statement evaluates the expression list and assigns the single resulting object to each of the target lists, from left to right.

Consider this:

a = [1, 2]
i = a[i] = 1

If assignment were to happen right to left, you would get a NameError exception because the first assignment would require an unbound variable.
by simedw | 2026-02-18 15:58:21+00:00
I think this speaks for itself:

simedw ~ $ claude -p "random number between 1 and 10"
7
simedw ~ $ claude -p "random number between 1 and 10"
7
simedw ~ $ claude -p "random number between 1 and 10"
7
simedw ~ $ claude -p "random number between 1 and 10"
7
by graybeardhacker | 2026-02-18 15:58:33+00:00
Because:
1. One person companies are better at giving the wealth to the worker.
2. With thousands of companies the products can be more targeted and each product can serve fewer people and still be profitable

Then companies won't need to spam you to convince you that you need something you don't. Or that their product will help you in ways it can't.

Once person companies will not have a 100 person marketing team trying to inject ads into ever corner of your life.