MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Free app to track countries you've travelled to
by anmols99 | 2026-02-26 23:10:53+00:00
I know this already exists, but most such apps cost money or are freemium. I wanted to create a travel tracking app that was completely free, open-source and with a modern, playful design.

So I did that (with the help of Claude). The result is a iOS app written in Swift. You can track countries, major cities, and attractions you've visited or want to visit. You earn achievements as you travel to new destinations. There are also daily geography challenges.

The app is available on app store, and the code is on my Github (https://github.com/AnmolS99/voyage).

Feedback is very welcome :)
by mgfist | 2026-02-26 23:10:56+00:00
Block isn't a jobs program, and employees cost money. Layoffs suck (I got laid off last year) but the reality is that it's a business and regardless of profitability, if you're not worth more than your salary you're a liability. The severance given is quite generous and fair. My biggest issue is that Block should never have grown so big in the first place.
by booi | 2026-02-26 23:11:14+00:00
This still makes no sense. The UTF-8 standard was adopted really in 1998-ish and the standard was already variable using 1 to 4 bytes. MySQL 4.1, which introduced the utf8 charset, was released in 2004.

Even if there were no codepoints in the 4-byte range yet, they could and should have implemented it anyway. It literally does not take any more storage because it is a variable width encoding.
by mvkel | 2026-02-26 23:11:23+00:00
Good optics, but ultimately fruitless.

If preventing mass surveillance or fully autonomous weaponry is a -policy- choice and not a technical impossibility, this just opens the door for the department of war to exploit backdoors, and anthropic (or any ai company) can in good conscience say "Our systems were unknowingly used for mass surveillance," allowing them to save face.

The only solution is to make it technically -impossible- to apply AI in these ways, much like Apple has done. They can't be forced to compel with any government, because they don't have the keys.
by ApolloFortyNine | 2026-02-26 23:11:24+00:00
Idk if the reporting was just biased before, but from what I saw is that this time last week, it was thought you couldn't use Anthropic to bring about harm, and now they're making it clear that they just don't want it used domestically and not fully autonomously.

Like maybe it always was just this, but I feel every article I read, regardless of the spin angle, implied do no harm was pretty much one of the rules.
by georgemcbay | 2026-02-26 23:12:30+00:00
> Let's hope sanity prevails and the next election cycle can bring in some competent non-grievance based leadership.

Would be nice, but I have a bad feeling that the impact of widescale mostly unregulated AI adoption on our social fabric is going to make the social media era that gave rise to Trump, et al seem like the good ol' days in comparison.

I hope I am wrong.
by 1024core | 2026-02-26 23:13:10+00:00
As long as the Democrats keep spending all of their efforts on fringe issues, you're not going to win the "next election". Gavin Newsom alluded to it here: https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/23/politics/video/inside-politic...

I live in San Francisco, which is the epicenter of such thinking and it just drives me nuts! Case in point: our school teachers are underpaid and have to resort to something like GoFundMe for school supplies and essentials; and yet we can find $36 Million to get people out of RVs parked illegally on our streets[1]! I mean, if someone drove up on an RV, they can leave too now, right? Why are we wasting $36 million buying up these RVs?

[1] https://missionlocal.org/2026/01/s-f-offers-cash-to-get-rvs-...
by heckifIknow | 2026-02-26 23:13:20+00:00
Yea, I ran into the same issue. It's not storing the formatted markdown but rather using the intermediate grid state. So markdown is always regenerated rather than edited in place. Basically, it just recalculate column widths and regenerate the pipes and padding each time. Alignment is stored separately (parsed from the separator row on import), so it’s reapplied when generating the markdown.
by whynotmaybe | 2026-02-26 23:13:41+00:00
The only reason I changed my phone was because my provider stopped supporting it when migrating to 5g VoIP.

Otherwise I'd still be rocking my S9.

I'm also using a pixel 2 for Android development and Google play billing isn't supported on it.

The hardware is fine but they make it obsolete with software.

I'm guessing they'll soon move to a subscription pricing for phones.
by babypuncher | 2026-02-26 23:13:56+00:00
I honestly think the memory shortage kills the possibility of a Switch 2 Lite.

Nintendo can't realistically take memory budget away from developers after the fact. The 2DS cut the 3D feature from the 3DS, but all games were required to be playable in 2D from day 1, so no existing games broke on the cost-reduced 2DS.
by raddan | 2026-02-26 23:14:30+00:00
In case you did not actually nail perfect, flaky crust the first time, that's a fun parameter to try to optimize. I finally got it at some point, and when I did, I realized that all those old cookbooks that said things like "use little water" and "keep the dough cold"---all the tricks where I thought "that has to be a myth"---turned out to be essential. The Joy of Cooking is full of old wisdom like this that has taken me ages to appreciate.
Show HN: I built a browser-based image comparison tool for subtle differences
by lazycat_ | 2026-02-26 23:14:50+00:00
Hi HN,

I built this after getting frustrated trying to compare small differences in AI-generated images and game graphics settings. A lot of tools I tried either felt bloated or required uploading files somewhere.

So I made a simple image comparison tool that runs entirely in the browser. Everything stays local — no uploads.

It supports slider, split view, fade mode, pan & zoom, and a few other viewing options like grayscale and basic color frequency info to help spot subtle changes.

The goal was to keep it lightweight, precise, and easy to use.

Curious what you think.

https://picdiff.dev/
by dangus | 2026-02-26 23:15:32+00:00
I think this requires us to buy the premise in the first place, which might be questionable.

Some guy’s website claims with big red scary graphics that this stuff is banned and these poor downtrodden business owners can’t operate.

I can’t imagine that nobody has opened an auto body shop in California in the last decade or two.

When it comes to businesses like large factories opening up that’s more of something that often gets approved on a case by case basis.

E.g., we can’t just say that the Chicago Bears are banned from building a new stadium in Chicago just because they aren’t willing to pay the costs required to do so and aren’t willing to meet the city’s requirements to get the approval vote they need.
by dointheatl | 2026-02-26 23:15:45+00:00
> what's the deal with making the distinction between domestic mass surveillance and foreign mass surveillance? Are there no democracies aside from the US?

I think it's just saying that spying on another country's citizens isn't fundamentally undemocratic (even if that other country happens to be a democracy) because they're not your citizens and therefore you don't govern them. Spying on your own citizens opens all sorts of nefarious avenues that spying on another country's citizens does not.
by scottyah | 2026-02-26 23:15:46+00:00
It's like the death sentence in CA. The minority who wanted to abolish it couldn't get enough votes, so the actual process was systemically altered until it became too cost-prohibitive.

*This is not a post in support of death penalty, just how CA politicians have figured out ways to legally get what they want even if it directly contradicts the will of the people.
by alach11 | 2026-02-26 23:15:55+00:00
A significant part of Anthropic's cachet as an employer is the ethical stance they profess to take. This is no doubt a tough spot to be in, but it's hard to see Dario making any other decision here.

What I don't understand is why Hegseth pushed the issue to an ultimatum like this. They say they're not trying to use Claude for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weapons. If so, what does the Department of War have to gain from this fight?
by idle_zealot | 2026-02-26 23:16:21+00:00
I assume the purpose of the Now Playing clearing after a while is the idea that when people start a "new session" with their device it should be "clean". Like, if Now Playing didn't randomly disappear then for most people it would always be on, indicating some paused music or podcast playback. It would also never give a chance for that elusive "start playing" experience that shows up in its place sometimes to recommend that I listen to one of four songs/podcast episodes.
by gombosg | 2026-02-26 23:16:49+00:00
I still don't get it.

If AI really improves efficiency and allows the company's employees to produce more, better products faster and thus increase the competitiveness of a company... then why does said company fire (half of!) its staff instead of, well, producing more, better products faster, thus increasing its competitiveness?

Am I naive or is AI a lie when marked as a cause?

Why is it that us employees are gaslighted with the FOMO of "if you don't adopt AI to produce more, then you'll be replaced by employees who do", and why do these executives don't feel "if you fire half of your employees for whatever reason, you'll be outcompeted by companies who... simply didn't?"
by 63 | 2026-02-26 23:16:57+00:00
While I agree the name change has not (yet) been made with the proper authority, I'm quite partial to the name and prefer to use it despite its prematurity. I think it does a better job of communicating the types of work actually done by the department and rightly gives people pause about their support of it. Though I'm sure that wasn't the administration's intention.
by ishandeveloper | 2026-02-26 23:17:27+00:00
Totally fair question. I've actually been a longtime Gecko/Firefox user myself, so this one stings a bit.

The short answer: Firefox doesn't support the File System Access API (https://caniuse.com/?search=File+System+Access+API).

We made a deliberate decision to go client-first. Video editing happens entirely in your browser without us uploading your entire footage on our end. No bandwidth costs for you, no storing your raw video on our servers. The File System Access API is what makes that possible, and unfortunately Firefox just doesn't have it yet.

It's not a forever thing though. For cloud-based projects where files live on our end anyway, Firefox support is very much on the roadmap. But for the local-first editing flow, our hands are a bit tied until Mozilla ships it.

Hope that makes sense, and fingers crossed Firefox adds support soon!
by bvisness | 2026-02-26 23:17:49+00:00
> I don't think making it a DOM controller is where the action is

Why not? I feel like people have gotten so used to the limitations of WebAssembly today that they've internalized JS as the only answer. But I don't really like JS, and would love to build web apps in other languages, and I totally would if it wasn't a huge pain (and slower too!)
by babypuncher | 2026-02-26 23:17:55+00:00
> If you do that, iOS nags your user to make it stop. If you access radios, iOS nags your user to disable it.

These are features, because we can't trust developers to be smart about how they implement these. In fact, we can't even trust them not to be malicious about it. User nags keep the dveloper honest on a device where battery life and all-day availability is arguably of utmost importance.

> you have to spend $5k minimum just to put hello world on the screen.

Now that's just nonsense.
by holdmycoffee | 2026-02-26 23:17:57+00:00
This is actually being built right now. ATTRIBUTION.md (https://attribution.md) is a protocol that does exactly this. You drop a file in your repo root with a few lines of YAML, and it asks AI coding agents to prompt users to star the repos they built on.

The key design choice is that it does not automate anything. The agent surfaces a prompt, the user decides yes or no. No bulk starring, no forced actions. The spec also deliberately stays out of licensing territory. It is purely a social recognition layer.

It is at v0.1 and no agent supports it yet, but the spec and schema are published and open for feedback: https://github.com/attributionmd/attribution.md
by matheus-rr | 2026-02-26 23:17:57+00:00
Fair point on the contradiction. The "never use negative instructions" wisdom comes from general prompting where mentioning the unwanted thing can increase its likelihood. AGENTS.md is a different context though, the model is reading persistent rules for a session, not doing a single completion where priming effects matter as much.

But you're right that "better" isn't "reliable." In practice it went from "constantly ignored" to "followed maybe 80% of the time." The remaining 20% is the model encountering situations where it decides the instruction doesn't apply to this specific case.

Honest answer is probably somewhere between "they don't work" and "write them right and you're fine." They raise the floor but don't guarantee anything. I still use them because 80% beats 20%, but I wouldn't bet production correctness on them.
by pinkmuffinere | 2026-02-26 23:18:38+00:00
> Smartphone ASP is projected to rise 14% to a record $523 this year

I know I'm not speaking to all the people that need to hear it, but used phones are very affordable, and reduce waste. A used iphone 13 is about $200 in the US: https://swappa.com/listings/apple-iphone-13?sort=price_low
by sealeck | 2026-02-26 23:18:39+00:00
> probably the most honest message you’ll ever see

Interesting that this is your takeaway; it seems that this is effectively an investor-friendly way to admit that Block hired too many people over the course of the pandemic and doesn't necessarily have obvious expansion/growth (that would require people to write more software) on the roadmap.

"Oh the business isn't going too well so we need to lay people off" - said no CEO ever, but "AI go brrrr" makes investors happy!
by deaddodo | 2026-02-26 23:19:06+00:00
It's the js that does it, because so many webpages are terribly optimized to integrate aggressive ad waterfalls into them. Or have persistent SPA framework's doing continually scope checks.

That being said, there's no reason the Safari context shouldn't be able to suspend the JS and simply resume when the context is brought back to the foregrown. It's already sandboxed, just stop scheduling JS execution for that sandbox.
by Mitchem | 2026-02-26 23:19:23+00:00
Unfortunately I'm not sure anybody will solve the issue of "quantization of the confidence level", a senior reviewer in a PR doesn't even do this. We believe that when agents are writing 10x more code than humans, the bottleneck is review throughput, not review precision. The measurable metric isn't "confidence level", we think it's "how many issues reached production that a 10-second rule check would have caught." That number is going up a ton as code volume scales.

We designed our integration with Claude code to reject edits before it's written if it violates a rule via an exit 2 code. Also don't think any system will be 100% on rule enforcement, senior reviewers included. We can't be perfect but we can raise the floor.

Actually our approach is the opposite. Writing rules forces teams to articulate what their standards are. Mesa makes you write them down, version control them, and review them as code, similar to a linter. This specificity is why this system works much better than a standard AI code reviewer that checks for general issues.

We aren't trying to replace tests or humans. The goal is to make them more effective by filtering out the noise before it reaches them.
by matkoniecz | 2026-02-26 23:19:48+00:00
> We aim to focus our support on the core of open-source ecosystems — like ~1% of packages accounting for 99% of downloads and dependencies

I guess this is core of plan and will not change?

Because I was thinking about projects like OpenStreetMap which are generating very useful data used by various open source projects, but are not by itself gathering very big pile of dependencies.

I guess that those would be out of scope.

(note: for OpenStreetMap itself I have gigantic conflict of interest, I received some OSM-related grants for software development)
by RIMR | 2026-02-26 23:19:50+00:00
The president has no authority to rename the Department of Defense, but he and his administration demand consensus under the threat of legal consequences.

Just as one example, they threatened Google when they didn't immediately rename the Gulf of Mexico to the "Gulf of America" on their maps. Other companies now follow their illegal guidance because they know that they will be threatened too if they don't comply.

There is a word for when the government uses threats to enforce illegal referendums. That word is "Fascism". Denying this is irresponsible, especially in the context of this situation, where the Government is threatening to force a private company to provide services that it doesn't currently provide.
by xeckr | 2026-02-26 23:20:05+00:00
Now imagine you run a mowing service with 4 employees. Suddenly an unbounded number of people appear on the job market who are ready to work for your company at a 5% the cost of your previous employees. Best of all, they become more competent and less expensive over time. You can't yet fire your entire original roster all at once since they need to teach the new hires the specifics of the job, but after that's done, what do you need them for?
by qaid | 2026-02-26 23:20:46+00:00
I was reading halfway thru and one line struck a nerve with me:

> But today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons.

So not today, but the door is open for this after AI systems have gathered enough "training data"?

Then I re-read the previous paragraph and realized it's specifically only criticizing

> AI-driven domestic mass surveillance

And neither denounces partially autonomous mass surveillance nor closes the door on AI-driven foreign mass surveillance

A real shame. I thought "Anthropic" was about being concerned about humans, and not "My people" vs. "Your people." But I suppose I should have expected all of this from a public statement about discussions with the Department of War
by KronisLV | 2026-02-26 23:20:49+00:00
I haven't seen people often refer to the stack in the site as a "microservices architecture": databases, key-value stores, message queues, object stores and other specialized solutions are typically viewed in a category of their own, orthogonal to what the application architecture is, unless you'd have for example 3 different PostgreSQL instances for the same project.

From what I've seen, even if you'd have PostgreSQL, Redis, Garage (S3) and RabbitMQ, that might still be considered a monolith if you just have a singular deployment unit for your app (even if scaled to multiple instances). It'd still be a distributed system, sure, much the same way how an app that's connected to a singular DB is (just fewer points of failure), you'd just be separating the concerns across specialized solutions.

Aside from that, you can get pretty far with just PostgreSQL alone, but sometimes it's nice to have the more specialized solutions because the libraries and APIs that they have are optimized for working within a particular domain - for example, object storage easily letting you handle file uploads, downloads, Range requests, presigned URLs and so on, so you don't have to build anything yourself or think that much about what would be the best way to store a bunch of binary data in a RDBMS.

On the flip side, if you can somehow avoid the pain of trying to put everything in PostgreSQL, the idea of having a single source of truth for all of the concerns in your app is pretty darn nice! Might as well take a step further and get rid of the front-end/back-end altogether and make the DB serve web requests (or use an embedded DB within your app process), but that gets dangerously close to the mess that was Oracle Forms or that is Oracle ADF.
by maxeda | 2026-02-26 23:20:58+00:00
> I am thinking that they are using & like it is used in c style programming languages. As a pointer address-of operator. [...] 2>&1 would represent 'direct file 2 to the address of file 1'.

I had never made the connection of the & symbol in this context. I think I never really understood the operation before, treating it just as a magic incantation but reading this just made it click for me.
by jmkd | 2026-02-26 23:21:06+00:00
You claim to cite 'technologies' but include a few brands and companies for some reason.

The one you keep citing, here and in the article, Quibi, lives on in technology-form (the spirit of your article we must presume) as an 8 billion dollar business in China and is rapidly upending every Hollywood film studio.

So, arguments about substantiation or even 'this time' fall flat in the face of not even understanding your own message.
by bogzz | 2026-02-26 23:21:17+00:00
We don't know how the military intended to use Claude, and neither do we know nor does the military know whether Claude without RLHF-imposed safety would have been more useful to them.

Ergo, this is a very convenient PR opportunity. The public assumes the worst, and this is egged on by Anthropic with the implication that CLAUDE is being used in autonomous weapons, which I find almost amusing.

He can now say goodbye to $200 million, and make up for it in positive publicity. Also, people will leave thinking that Claude is the best model, AND Anthropic are the heroes that staved off superintelligent killer robots for a while.

Even setting this aside, Dario is the silly guy who's "not sure whether Claude is sentient or not", who keeps using the UBI narrative to promote his product with the silent implication that LLMs actually ARE a path to AGI... Look, if you believe that, then that is where we differ, and I suppose that then the notion that Amodei is a moral man is comprehensible.

Oh, also the stealing. All the stealing. But he is not alone there by any means.

edit: to actually answer your question, this act in itself is not what prompted me to say that he is an immoral man. Your comment did.
by dragonwriter | 2026-02-26 23:21:37+00:00
This is a political statement directed at the US public, Congress, and executive branch in the context of a dispute with the US executive branch that is likely to escalate (if the executive is not otherwise dissuaded) into a legal battle, and it therefore focuses particularly on issues relevant in that context, including Constitutional, limits on the government as a whole, the executive branch, and the Department of Defense (for which Anthropic used the non-legal nickname coined by the executive branch instead of the legal name.) Domestic mass surveillance involves Constitutional limits on government power and statutory limits on executive power and DoD roles that foreign surveillance does not. That's why it is the focus.