MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by co_king_5 | 2026-02-17 16:15:14+00:00
I don't know if "performance" is relevant in this context, where these "tools" are marketed to non-technical developers (read: "vibe coders") who are by definition unable to verify the quality of the code produced by their LLMs;

I think branding is the entire game.

My illiterate, LLM-addict cousin is convinced that Claude is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.

Criticisms of the code he (read: Claude) generates are not relevant to him -- Claude is the most intelligent being to ever exist, therefore, to critique its output is a naive waste of breath.
by Teever | 2026-02-17 16:15:21+00:00
Some people are often drawn to toxic abusers.

It's pretty well established at this point that victims of childhood abuse are much more likely to enter into relationships that involve violence from their intimate partners.

One of the best predictors for someone entering a abusive relationship is whether ot not that person has previously been in one and whether they have processed it therapeutically.

I understand your instinct to defend people who have been hurt but this isn't a matter of assigning blame to them. It's about identifying patterns and finding ways to break them.
Show HN: Mirroir – MCP server that gives AI agents a real iPhone to control
by jfarcand | 2026-02-17 16:15:24+00:00
Salut! I built this because I wanted AI agents to interact with real iOS apps — not simulators, not screenshots of mockups, the actual running app on a real phone.

It works by hijacking macOS iPhone Mirroring: the MCP server captures the mirrored screen, runs Apple Vision OCR to find UI elements with tap coordinates, then sends input through a Karabiner DriverKit virtual keyboard/mouse. The AI sees the screen, decides what to tap/type/swipe, and the iPhone responds.

Some interesting technical rabbit holes:

- iOS elements aren't exposed via Accessibility — the mirroring window is a single opaque AXHostingView with zero children. OCR is the only way to read the screen.
- Clipboard paste doesn't work programmatically. At all. We tried everything — HID Cmd+V, AX menu automation, AppleScript, CGEvents. The paste bridge lives deep in the Continuity/Handoff stack and requires a physical user gesture.
- Input goes through a Karabiner DriverKit extension that presents as a US ANSI keyboard to iOS, regardless of your Mac's keyboard layout.

Limitations I should be upfront about: macOS 15+ only, one phone at a time, no clipboard bridge for paste, and the phone needs to stay unlocked during a session.

It's open source (Apache 2.0): https://github.com/jfarcand/iphone-mirroir-mcp

Properly configure permissions if you use it with OpenClaw ;-)
by jonhohle | 2026-02-17 16:15:30+00:00
I’ve tried to explain this before and unless you’re steeped in late binding, encapsulation, and message passing, the details are lost on most people (it seems including modern language designers).

For the GP, in most languages the dot or arrow operator is field access. If that field is a function reference, parenthesis are used to invoke it.

From outside of the object, neither Ruby or Objective-C allow direct access to object fields or functions. The dot operator sends the object a message that be bound to anything, and even rebound at runtime for specific instances. There is no difference between access and property and calling a function - it’s all messages. Smalltalk and Objective-C (before dot operators) don’t even have different syntax for data fields and functions calls. Ruby’s no arg messages are similar.

Most of the time that distinction doesn’t matter. But writing things like wrappers and proxies becomes trivial. A object can forward any message it receives, and if it sees on it wants to intercept, it can do that easily. Most of the time modifying existing programs and frameworks can be as easy as rebinding some logic to something that wasn’t part of the original program.

This comes at the cost of some runtime performance, and possibly some complexity. The elegance outweighs those, imho.
Show HN: Google rejected my privacy app for "low engagement"
by safestream | 2026-02-17 16:15:38+00:00
Hi HN,
I’m an indie dev who is tired of "safety" apps that are actually just glorified spyware. Most parental control services demand you upload your child’s entire digital life (location, history, usage) to their cloud servers. I refuse to accept that safety requires sacrificing privacy to Big Tech.

So I built Emberkin.

It is a Serverless, P2P monitoring tool.

No Cloud Database: The parent's device is the only storage.

No Middleman: Data travels directly from Child to Parent via an encrypted tunnel.

My servers see nothing: I only facilitate the handshake.

The Problem (Why I'm posting): I just finished the mandatory "20 testers for 14 days" on Google Play. Google rejected my production access. Their reason? "Insufficient user engagement." Apparently, a privacy app that runs silently in the background doesn't trigger their "engagement metrics" enough. They want me to restart the 14-day sentence.

I need to prove to Google that real humans are using this, not bots.

The Tech Stack (For the curious):

Architecture: Native Android (Kotlin + Jetpack Compose).

Connectivity: WebRTC Data Channels over NSD (local) and TURN (remote).

Crypto: Custom AES-256-GCM implementation.

Permissions: Accessibility Services (strictly for on-device analysis, no data leaves the tunnel).

The Ask: I’m looking for tech-savvy parents or developers to install the beta and actually use it.

- Pair two devices .

- Send some data through the P2P tunnel.

- Help me generate enough "engagement events" to get this approved.

If you believe children's data belongs in the family, not on a corporate server, please help me out.

Beta Link & Architecture breakdown: https://www.emberkin.app/en/architecture

I’ll be in the comments answering questions about the nightmare of NAT traversal and Android permissions.
by thatfrenchguy | 2026-02-17 16:16:19+00:00
> 1) Eliminate the H-1B visa entirely. If a company wants to hire an immigrant, they can just sponsor the Green Card up front, knowing the worker can fuck off once they have it. The net result would be decreased immigration and increased offshoring, which brings me to…

Do you know how long those take? Consular processing for green cards is painful as hell and somehow even longer than adjustment of status if you're in a non-backlogged country. The real solution here is obviously to allow self-sponsorship for employment based green cards.

> Companies that do 90% of their business in America but whose workforce (contractors, consultants, and FTEs) aren’t 90% American?

I mean, do you want to tax a company that hires foreigners, sponsor their green cards, just because some of their employees decide to not naturalize (say, like Apple or Google or Meta?) ? That makes zero sense.

> For-profit business models predicated on shunting workers onto every possible social welfare program

H1B folks aren't eligible for any social welfare program, even though they, e.g. contribure to Medicare / Social Security.
by gauravvij137 | 2026-02-17 16:16:29+00:00
We just released an open source project for agent swarm based stock trading simulations built and tested by heyneo.so - Fully autonomous ML engineering agent.

The agent swarm self coordinates with each other via an asynchronous message bus.

There are around 10 agents with distinct roles:
- 3 Analyst Agents → Generate BUY/SELL signals (SMA crossovers, volume trends)
- 4 Trader Agents → Execute trades, manage $250K portfolios each
- 2 Risk Managers → Validate orders, enforce stop-loss rules
- 1 Reporter Agent → Aggregate P&L and generate reports

The simulation consists of capital allocation, risk checks like stop-losses and order blocking, and reporting baked into the flow. The system backtests over ~250 trading days, starts with a fixed $1M capital, and logs things like drawdown, blocked orders, and approval rates.

Repo here if anyone wants to dig into the implementation or poke holes in the design:
https://github.com/dakshjain-1616/Stock-trading-Agent-Swarm-...

Extend the project in your VS Code IDE with Neo:
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=NeoResea...
by ekr | 2026-02-17 16:16:31+00:00
I'd say just stick that $100k in a diversified all-world ETF, because putting it into some random's entrepreneur wannabe is unlikely to pay off (you'll probably not get anything back). Unless you're really wealthy, but then, isn't it better to just donate it to causes you care about?

If investment is what you're after, this approach doesn't seem likely to offer a good risk/return tradeoff.

I do have some things I'd want to start myself, some in those categories, but I'm more lacking time and energy than money. And a bit stuck by life problems?
by linguae | 2026-02-17 16:17:24+00:00
Definitely. I left the industry and became a community college professor two years ago, partly because I felt disillusioned with the industry. This decision had nothing to do with LLMs.

As someone who was inspired by people like Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Alan Kay, and other major figures of computing, I’m not inspired by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, and other current tech leaders. But the current leadership is the current leadership, and they have set the tone not only for our industry, but society as a whole.

While I am not opposed to LLMs per se, LLMs in software development, in my opinion, have made the relationship between the employer and the employee crystal clear: employers own the means of production and can dictate how they want their employees to work. Despite the limitations of LLMs, if employers want them to be used because they feel they could ship faster, then employees at those companies have no choice but to use them if they want to keep their jobs. Some employees might not even have the option of using LLMs since they may get outright replaced by them.

The employer has always dictated the terms of employment, but software engineers have enjoyed many decades of relative freedom and negotiating power due to their in-demand, hard-to-replace skills. Indeed, there are many companies where engineers had significant influence regarding the company’s software.

LLMs, combined with other economic factors (the end of ZIRP, the software industry being dominated by a tiny handful of powerful players), are threatening to change this by reasserting the power of business owners and managers to set the agenda.

Even before LLMs, I felt the software industry has moved away from craftsmanship, quality, and creativity. LLMs in software development may accelerate this, since there may be fewer opportunities for engineers to push back.

I think software craftsmanship is going to end up becoming just like art. Unfortunately it will be paid for accordingly, and that’s the unsettling thing that many of us need to adjust to.
Show HN: Deathwink – Send messages to people after you die
by randallme | 2026-02-17 16:18:30+00:00
Hey HN. I built Deathwink (https://deathwink.com) -- a web app that delivers your messages after you die.

You write a message, record a video or audio message, or both -- attach whatever you want, add your recipients, and go live your life. Every 30 days, we check in. If you stop responding, after 90 days we assume you've died and deliver your messages.

The idea came from a real place. In my early 20s, my best friend Sean and I came up during the first dot-com boom. We were broke, dumb, and inseparable. He died of an overdose a few years later. I never told him what his friendship meant to me—not because I didn't feel it, but because that's not what guys like us did. I wrote a memoir about it (How You Wish You Could Leave), and somewhere in the process of reliving all that regret, I realized I wanted to build the thing I wished had existed.

On the technical side: it's serverless on AWS -- Lambda functions behind API Gateway, RDS, Angular frontend on S3/CloudFront, Cognito for auth, SES for email delivery, and EventBridge-triggered workers that run the lifecheck monitor and wink delivery daily. Stripe for payments.

Business model: one-time payment, not a subscription. Three tiers from $500 to $3,000 depending on how many winks and attachments you need. I didn't want to build something where people worry about their credit card expiring before they do.

Happy to answer questions about the architecture, the delivery reliability problem (how do you make sure messages actually arrive years from now), or anything else.
by mamcx | 2026-02-17 16:18:43+00:00
Yeah, in special if you "stop-start-stop" constantly.

Give time to ramp-up. I like to start 2-3 days with things like the "7 minute workout" before dive in into anything more complicated.

Is better quantity than "quality" until you actually can put the discipline and consistency. If not, just walk is good enough
by palata | 2026-02-17 16:18:48+00:00
> I think MicroG - which provides dummy no-op implementations of Google Play tracking APIs, and allows you to select alternative Location Providers and notification backends - is a better option than running first-party Google software.

microG still forwards the requests to the Google servers. Not sure what you mean by "tracking APIs"? microG is a reverse-engineered, open source implementation of a subset of Play Services, right? It's not obviously a better option: for instance, some things that are supported in Play Services are not supported in microG, and microG sometimes breaks (because of changes in the API).

> allows you to select alternative Location Providers

GOS does that, too.

> I do think GOS lulls users into complacency by focusing on the security angle only and encouraging users to install sandboxed GApps

I don't get that. It does not encourage them to install Play Services, it makes it available. Because for many (most?) users, it is important to have it.

I am not sure what you are trying to say: is your opinion that there is no point in using an alternative OS (like GOS, /e/OS, LineageOS, IodeOS, ...) or are you trying to say that GOS is not the most secure/private alternative OS?
by codexb | 2026-02-17 16:19:26+00:00
Ok, but forgiving student loans doesn't do that. It signals to borrowers that they don't have to repay high loans if their career can't support it. It tells borrowers that they can make risky loans without a chance of default. It tells universities that they can keep charging exorbitant tuitions because kids can still get loans to pay them.

The solution is to allow judges the discretion to default them in bankruptcy after X number of years after graduation. Lenders need to accept the risk. With no risk, they can loan as much as they want and have guaranteed repayment. This drives tuition higher and higher.
by dogline | 2026-02-17 16:19:31+00:00
That's cool! I've noticed when asking for Claude for a website, it does have a certain look, like our two sites, if you don't give it any more guidance. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not.

Digitizing history in different ways, with different resources that are unique or only known to small groups, might be a new development area, and that's exciting. As I've shown, and how other people have shared, using AI tools to digitize things which haven't previously been done before is now possible. Are there ways to make this easier for everybody? New techniques to discuss? I don't know, and I'd love to talk about it.

Concerning OCR: I used Mistral because of a posting here describing advancements with handwriting recognition a month or so ago. I didn't actually compare them. And I've got my setup that I can rerun everything again later if there are advancements in the area. Again, another area to keep track of and discuss.
by namirsab | 2026-02-17 16:19:45+00:00
Hey, WeaselsWin is my colleague and i'm the one who had this weird hallucination. I was in plan mode and i confirmed the plan and suddenly Claude Code started outputting text about completely different topics and hallucinating like this:

see that the database system is already quite well understood in the instructions. Let me provide a brief summary:

Understanding the Mission System

The mission system consists of several interconnected components that work together to manage tasks:

Key Components

┌─────────────────────────┬─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Component │ Description │
├─────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Database (Total) │ A persistent storage layer that maintains the full record of all tasks and their states │
├─────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Mission Active (active) │ A real-time view of currently running/pending missions │
├─────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Mission Service │ Core service managing mission lifecycle (create, update, complete) │
├─────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Mission Calendar │ Scheduling system for time-based mission planning │
└─────────────────────────┴─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

How They Interact

1. Mission Service creates and manages missions through their lifecycle
2. Database stores all mission data persistently
3. Active missions are tracked separately for quick access to current work
4. Calendar provides scheduling capabilities for future missions

Status Flow

Created → Active → In Progress → Completed
↘ Cancelled

The system ensures data consistency across all components while maintaining efficient access patterns for both active and historical missions.

Confirmation

I've provided a comprehensive overview of how the mission system works. The existing documentation in the codebase already covers:

- File structure and locations
- Service interactions between components
- Data flow from creation to completion
- Error handling and edge cases

Is there anything specific about the mission system you'd like me to elaborate on?
by Ajedi32 | 2026-02-17 16:19:52+00:00
Yes, that's my point. That bet ended 8 years ago. If "multiplying money" is really the sole goal then why didn't all the pension funds switch to investing in index funds back then? There are clearly some structural issues here which don't align well with the idea that pensions are a "paperclip maximizer" with the goal of maximizing returns.

I find it interesting that the OP isn't arguing pensions should switch to investing in index funds, but rather into other projects the OP considers morally superior and that he personally believes will give better returns then hedge funds. To me that just feels like trading one set of hedge fund managers for another.
by nate-gehringer | 2026-02-17 16:20:00+00:00
I appreciate the feedback and sanity checking!

I’m definitely planning on add a wider array of chords types now that the app is basically working. As far as the 7th inversions, I essentially “ignored” inversions by flattening the notes into a single octave … there may be an issue with this logic.

I came across <https://chord-display.rednet.io> myself yesterday and took a cursory look. Nice app. They use a library called `tonal` <https://github.com/tonaljs/tonal> for their music theory logic, which ought to be a good resource to validate against.
by etchalon | 2026-02-17 16:20:00+00:00
So you believe universities have taken advantage of students by crafting, encouraging and financing education programs with an understanding that those programs would not result in jobs which would be sufficient to repay the debt needed to complete them, but you think the 18 year olds who were taken advantage of should be forced to suffer for their failure to make perfect decisions at 18.

Cool. Cool.
by cogman10 | 2026-02-17 16:20:10+00:00
The solution to that is rebuilding the state and federal funding for higher education with added regulations on where and how that money can be spent (perhaps even putting tuition caps in play).

The reason universities are so expensive is there is no limit on how much they can charge for tuition and no requirements on how much they pay their professors. It allows them to dump a huge portion of their funds into the marketing and athletic departments.

I know of a few religious universities who's mission is mainly to educate (so their well educated members can pay back more money to the church). While they do subsidize the educational costs, it isn't by as much as you'd think and it does result in some very cheap education.

There's no reason the government couldn't do exactly the same thing. It did right up until reagan.
by thelastgallon | 2026-02-17 16:20:24+00:00
Pension funds should have a rule -- invest in technologies, industries and companies that create a deflation (by technology, scale, efficiency, etc). This will create better outcomes for pensioners. If they invested in cheaper housing, healthcare, pensioners can live without the constant fear of running out of money. The absolute first thing to invest in is clean energy which can be super cheap to zero to actually making money by supplying power back to the grid. Once energy is solved, it solves an entire spectrum of problems.

Increasing the money(number), while making everything else costly (a lot more costlier in reality because of fictional inflation number) is not only hard to achieve, but even if achieved, doesn't mean much. ".S. Dollar itself has lost roughly 98% of its purchasing power over the long term" -- random Warren Buffett quote.
by jollyllama | 2026-02-17 16:20:28+00:00
> shame to anyone defending this abuse as some sort of pro immigration policy.

In what way is it not pro-immigration? Perhaps you mean "pro-immigrant"? In that case, your view is cogent, but I guess this just exposes that pro-immigration policy isn't necessarily good for the immigrants that it welcomes.

Immigration benefits capital. For example, as Federal Reserve Vice Chair Bowman indicated [0], immigration creates housing inflation.

[0] https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bowman20260...
by jonhohle | 2026-02-17 16:20:40+00:00
Do you feel like the current Apple engineering orgs either don’t understand the philosophy that came from NeXT or has the world changed and some of those choices are no longer possible?

For example, until a decade ago, macOS was extremely scriptable and consistent. IB was flexible, but approachable. There were few specialized frameworks, but a lot was possible with just Cocoa. Now it seems like dynamism at the programming level is frowned upon, scripting and automation require constant user permission, Swift seems to favor performance over dynamism, and it seems like any new concepts are now all relegated to their own framework.
by jwschmo218 | 2026-02-17 16:20:49+00:00
Author here. I've been building CV-Git for the past year — it models codebases as knowledge graphs (FalkorDB + Qdrant) instead of bolting metadata onto Git commits.
Entire's $60M raise last week validated the market, but I think their architecture (capturing prompts alongside commits) fundamentally misses the point. The relationships between code entities: calls, dependencies, causal chains; are where the real understanding lives, and you can't capture those in prompt logs.
The blog post walks through five specific queries that are trivial on a knowledge graph and impossible on text search over conversation transcripts: impact analysis, multi-agent conflict detection, design decision archaeology, safety boundary detection, and causal tracing.
The empirical results are honest: graph-augmented retrieval helps high-coupling systems (+4.1% dependency coverage) but actually hurts utility libraries (-5.2%). It's not universally better, it's better when the code has structural complexity worth modeling.
CV-Git is open source (MIT): https://github.com/controlVector/cv-git
Happy to answer questions about the architecture, the tradeoffs, or why I think the "adapter vs. native architecture" pattern applies here.