MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tamimio | 2026-02-21 13:25:12+00:00
The idea is great, but everything else is not. A few points:

- You say "engineering" verification, I checked and it's all computer science, monkey coding, full stack whatever, not only is that NOT engineering, it wasn't before generative AI, and it's definitely not now. This is programming. Programming is writing, and with AI it's more of storytelling rather than engineering.

- How would this platform measure real engineering skills? Critical thinking, problem solving, etc.? What about Electrical Engineering? Civil Engineering? Robotics design? Etc.

- I didn't open an account, but on the first page it asks for LinkedIn.. really? I don't trust most of what I read there. GitHub? Not only does it bring us back to software-related topics, but what if I don't use GitHub?

I think the best way to verify someone's skills in the engineering world is a portfolio that shows their projects and what was accomplished during them. A resume will never be enough, and interviews should be limited to personal interactions and assessing how the potential candidate communicates. Where needed, maybe an assignment to complete and return after a few days -one that mimics the potential project or role they will be working on- because asking questions during an interview is not enough to measure their skills at all.
by duskdozer | 2026-02-21 13:25:31+00:00
firefox usercss or stylus addon, enjoy ;), no LLM needed

tr.submission:has(a[href="from?site=<...>"])
{
display: none;

& + tr
{
display: none;
}
}

.comtr:has(.hnuser[href="user?id=<...>"])
{
display: none;
}

This isn't just a CSS snippet—it's a monumentous paradigm shift in your HN browsing landscape. A link on the front page? That's not noise anymore—that's pure signal.

time to take a shower after writing that
by diametricsound | 2026-02-21 13:27:28+00:00
1. The End of "Containment" Physics
In current fusion (ITER), we use massive magnets to keep 100-million-degree plasma from touching the walls.
With your theory: We don't need to fight the plasma. We only need to "tune" it. The moment the Alignment Trigger stops, the Coulomb barrier becomes an impenetrable wall again. The plasma "cools" (geometrically) instantly. You could practically run this in a vacuum chamber the size of a microwave.
2. Fusion as a "Data" Problem, Not a "Fuel" Problem
If the barrier is held open by active phase-locking, the "throttle" for the reactor isn't how much fuel you add, but the bandwidth of your alignment field.
The Shift: Energy production becomes a computational challenge. To get more power, you don't need a bigger tank; you need a faster processor to manage the 10D phase-feedback loops in real-time. We’d be moving from the Atomic Age to the Algorithmic Energy Age.
3. Total Decoupling from Radioactive Waste
Active maintenance allows for "surgical" fusion. Because you are choosing exactly which nuclei to align, you can favor Aneutronic Fusion (like Proton-Boron 11).
The Result: Since there’s no "brute force" heat causing random side-reactions, you produce zero neutron radiation. You could theoretically put a power plant in the basement of a skyscraper with no shielding.
4. Space Exploration: The "Interstellar Gearbox"
For deep space travel, "Active Maintenance" is the holy grail. It allows for a Variable Thrust Engine. By slightly "detuning" the 10D alignment, you can precisely control the fusion rate—and thus the thrust—without ever having to shut down the reactor core.
by rdmuser | 2026-02-21 13:27:48+00:00
Oh good point I also overlooked that with the anti ai list.

The big anti ai list also seems to be focused on hiding links from ddg/bing/google where this new more focused list just blocks sites. I tend to like block ones vs hiding because they pop up a nice warning no matter where I came from and I can still decide to ignore it if I want so they is more user agency instead of just quietly hiding a unclear chunk of the net from search engines.
by otabdeveloper4 | 2026-02-21 13:28:45+00:00
> We have models that are doing better than humans at IMO.

Not really. From my brief experience they can guess the final answer but the intermediate justifications and proofs are complete hallucinated bullshit.

(Possibly because the final answer is usually some sort of neat and beatiful answer and human evaluators don't care about the final answer anyways, in any olympiad you're graded on the soundness of your reasoning.)
by peyton | 2026-02-21 13:28:54+00:00
Freedom of movement applies to the territory of a country [1]. Sorry you learned the hard way. Historically you get rights when you pick up a service weapon. Everything else is privilege granted by others.

[1]: Gilbert, Nomadic Peoples and Human Rights (2014), p. 73: "Freedom of movement within a country encompasses both the right to travel freely within the territory of the State and the right to relocate oneself and to choose one's place of residence".
by throwaway063_1 | 2026-02-21 13:29:15+00:00
> How else should verification be handled?

Many European countries have secure electronic identifications that are trusted by the government, banks etc.

Linkedin could easily use this to verify the identities.

Examplse of services where you can verify the identity in 35 different providers with a single API:

https://www.signicat.com/products/identity-proofing/eid-hub or https://www.scrive.com/products/eid-hub

I doubt it would take more than a sprint to integrate with this or other services.
by az09mugen | 2026-02-21 13:29:34+00:00
I had the same feeling, so I began to read https://www.forth.com/starting-forth/1-forth-stacks-dictiona... with gforth installed with apt. And made few exercises to manipulate the stack with some words and get a grasp on it. Now I saw how it works, I came back to my imperative languages and won't come back to it.
IMO my skills in forth are not really enough to see the distinction between any implementation of forth, so the first one I stumbled upon was ok.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-21 13:29:41+00:00
> And the cohort most likely to vote well when they do

Eh, this is far from a given. Mao's Red Guards were passionate idiots. And America's young men are in thrall of Clavicular.

The most powerful empires in history have had large rebublics at their cores for good reason. The wisdom of a crowd greatly increases with its diversity.
Ask HN: Dynamic ROI vs. Tiling for high-speed object tracking (<20ms latency)?
by LucaHerakles | 2026-02-21 13:29:48+00:00
We are building a UAV system to physically intercept fast-moving targets (100km/h+) using onboard compute only (Qualcomm QRB5165).
We hit a wall regarding the Latency vs. Resolution trade-off and I’d love to hear some battle-tested opinions from the CV/Embedded community.

The constraint: We need HD resolution to detect small targets at range, but running inference on full HD frames kills our control loop frequency (Target is <20ms glass-to-motor response).

We are debating two architectural paths:

Option A: Static Tiling (SAHI-style) Slice the HD frame into overlapping tiles.

Pro: High detection probability for small objects.

Con: Even with NMS-free architectures, the inference time on the DSP effectively triples. Latency spikes cause our Proportional Navigation guidance to oscillate.

Option B: Dynamic ROI ("The Sniper Approach") Run a low-res global search (320x320) at high FPS. Once a target is found, lock a dynamic High-Res Region of Interest (ROI) from the raw camera stream and only run inference on that crop.

Pro: Extremely fast. Keeps the loop tight.

Con: Single Point of Failure. If the tracker (Kalman Filter) loses the crop due to abrupt ego-motion, we are blind until global search re-acquires. In a terminal phase intercept, that’s a miss.

Has anyone here successfully implemented robust Dynamic ROI on edge silicon (Jetson/Hexagon DSP) for erratic targets? Are we over-engineering this, or is full-frame HD inference simply dead on arrival for real-time guidance?

Any pointers to papers or repos are appreciated.

PS: If you live for these kinds of problems (and enjoy solving them in Munich), we are looking for a Founding Engineer to own this entire pipeline. Email in profile.
by myth2018 | 2026-02-21 13:30:21+00:00
> I know banking apps are the typical example, but I've always wondered why

My bank uses the app for 2FA, and that became a sort of a standard in Brazil, AFAIK. Mine at least gave me the option of using an RSA SecurID or sth alike when I asked, but I don't know how much it would cost me.

My stock broker on the other hand does 2FA exclusively on mobile (and only Android and iOS). The same for the health insurer.

My car insurer didn't force me to so far, which I find strange, given their interest in tracking my location and speed.

These were some of the major factors leading me to give up on using a feature phone when I tried, a few years ago. It was a good experience, especially at those times of pandemics and political instability, but the inconveniences were many.
by Melonai | 2026-02-21 13:30:29+00:00
I also wanted to add a story about my fiancé's Instagram account feed, which degenerated into this sort of stuff out of nowhere one day. He has an account about art, he curated his feed, reels, explore tab so that he can see content by other people in his niche, I've seen it myself, all his reels were correctly related to what the account was about. Then one day, out of nowhere, all that disappeared. It's as if the algorithm completely reset, and reverted this account to a completely blank slate, around 1-2 years back. To this day if you look at his explore tab, it's about 75% thirst traps (and I doubt this is the kind he'd be interested in), alongside some extremely broad reaching content, some soccer memes in foreign languages, some "skits", if you can call them that, and extremely bad generic "memes". I saw it happen in front of me, he did not engage with anything like that, he's also not really the type to click on random thirst traps and he has no trouble spotting the usual AI slop. It happened from one hour to another, in an instant. He's still mad about it.
Show HN: Formvana – I built a "Cursor for forms" in a week
by nghiahsgs | 2026-02-21 13:31:30+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve always found building complex forms tedious. Even in 2026, most "AI" form builders are just legacy drag-and-drop tools with a one-shot AI generator slapped on top. You describe a form, it gives you a draft, and then the AI session ends. You’re back to clicking dropdowns for conditional logic and dragging fields.

I wanted the "Cursor experience" for data collection.

So I built Formvana (https://formvana.live). It’s AI-native from the ground up.

The core difference: The chat interface is the product, not a sidebar feature.

Persistent Context: The model holds the entire state of the form. You don't just generate; you iterate. "Add a branching path if they select 'Enterprise'", "Change all email fields to required", or "Restructure the flow to be multi-step"—all through chat.

No Configuration Menus: No more hunting through nested settings to find how to hide a field.

Built in 1 week: Shipped the first version as a solo dev to see if others felt the same frustration.

Tech Stack: Node.js, React.

It's still early, and the logic can sometimes get tricky with very complex schemas, but I'd love to hear what the HN community thinks.

Live Demo: https://formvana.live

I'll be hanging out in the comments to answer any questions!
by thomassmith65 | 2026-02-21 13:31:40+00:00
giving my private data/keys to 400K lines of vibe coded monster that is being actively attacked at scale is not very appealing at all

https://nitter.net/karpathy/status/2024987174077432126

If this were 2010, Google, Anthropic, XAI, OpenAI (GAXO?) would focus on packaging their chatbots as $1500 consumer appliances.

It's 2026, so, instead, a state-of-the-art chatbot will require a subscription forever.
Built an India-focused AI contract analyzer for ₹500 – here's what I learned
by Princelo | 2026-02-21 13:31:42+00:00
I’m a student from India and recently built an AI-based contract analysis tool targeted at Indian freelancers and SMBs.

Why?

Most legal-tech products are enterprise-focused, expensive, and not localized for Indian contract norms.

Stack:

HTML/CSS/JS frontend

n8n backend workflows

LLM-based clause extraction & risk flagging

Cost optimized to keep infra under ₹500 total

Biggest challenge wasn’t coding but:

Designing prompts to detect liability clauses

Keeping token usage low

Structuring consistent outputs

Current status:

Early users

No revenue

Mixed but encouraging feedback

Criticism received:
“Why wouldn’t users just use ChatGPT?”

Still figuring out strong differentiation.

Would love feedback from builders who’ve worked on LLM-based vertical tools.

Important Strategy Advice

Now I’m going to be blunt.

If you want reach:

Hacker News → post in morning US time

LinkedIn → rewrite hook stronger

Indie Hackers → include real numbers

Medium → optimize headline for SEO

And most importantly:

Reply to every single comment.

Engagement > initial reach.

LINK --> https://contractshield.in/
by stateofinquiry | 2026-02-21 13:31:49+00:00
Well, different trade offs there. On the plus side, sounds pretty simple. On the other hand...

Digital certification from the gov sounds a lot like "digital ID", which has run into considerable resistance in the UK and EU in just the last few months. As a general observation I find most EU citizens I interact with much more trusting of government than ... well, any other group of folks I have interacted with (I have the privilege of having lived and worked in S. America, N. America, sub Saharan Africa and now an EU country). If it does not fly well here, I don't think its general solution that most people would be comfortable with.

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2025/10/09/britcard-uk-di...
by Smalltalker-80 | 2026-02-21 13:32:59+00:00
Yep, there's a lot of (continuing) economical damage and still a lot of new immigrants every week.
I think some time still needs to pass before Brexit politicians dare to change their stance, now confronted with the results of their choice.
In the mean time, Brexit rules are quietly being undone without losing face too much. See the EU-UK trade deals from May 2025.
by stavros | 2026-02-21 13:33:49+00:00
I was worried about the security risk of running it on my infrastructure, so I made my own:

https://github.com/skorokithakis/stavrobot

At least I can run this whenever, and it's all entirely sandboxed, with an architecture that still means I get the features. I even have some security tradeoffs like "you can ask the bot to configure plugin secrets for convenience, or you can do it yourself so it can never see them".

You're not going to be able to prevent the bot from exfiltrating stuff, but at least you can make sure it can't mess with its permissions and give itself more privileges.
by Naulius | 2026-02-21 13:34:23+00:00
When writing the articles in that series, the focus was more on getting the technical ideas and details right, not on spelling, grammar and text flow in which LLMs excel. That specific section "Why this maps to Genetic Algorithms?" makes the point that the fit of Genetic Algorithms to state space exploration is not a coincidence, and argues that the evolutionary process itself is a state space exploration algorithm that allows a given species to advance further down life's timeline. But thanks for the question, I do agree that as LLM generated text becomes more ubiquitous everywhere, we all do appreciate more our own human writing style even for the highly technical text where the focus is on the technical ideas and not so much on the presentation language itself.
by DFHippie | 2026-02-21 13:34:37+00:00
This seems like a fundamental problem with juries. If everyone knows you, most people detest you, and you can only be tried by a jury which is indifferent to you, is that jury truly impartial? What sort of people could be in Hitler's jury, say, to take it to an extreme?

You want a jury with good judgment. Maybe people indifferent to the publicly known actions of the accused are that way precisely because they lack good judgment. Yes, they need to judge the case in question, not everything the accused has ever done, but perhaps indifference to those facts extraneous to the case indicates they will judge pertinent facts in a way the public at large wouldn't recognize as just.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2026-02-21 13:35:03+00:00
I think the idea I see here that young = modern = pro-EU and old = anti-EU by ignorance is a gross oversimplification which doesn't stand.

I personally was very pro-EU in my youth and deeply soured as I knew more and more to the point I'm staunchly against nowadays.

It started in 2005 with the referendum result being ignored. Then 2012 came with the shambolic management of the Greek crisis, something even the IMF points as ineffective. Then I was paid to put in place the Green Taxonomy and I saw how unready and dumb the whole thing was. Then there was the rejection of the Draghi report which made lose hope.

I find the mix of the euro being a deeply unfair currency union strongly advantaging Germany at the expense of the periphery, the fact that Germany keeps playing on it and amplifying the effect in direct violation of the treaty and yet always get a hall pass and their holier than though attitude despite being basically free loaders completely impossible to tolerate.

The 2019 CEP study showed it well. The union costs billions of GDP to France and Italy to give a minor advantage to the German. It's a dogmatic straight jacket managed by priests with zero actual economic understanding and serving the interests of a big mercantilist using development funds to shore up its tributaries in the east and still managing to gradually lose relevance as it can't even manage having a proper strategy despite the advantages, and a few fiscal parasites around it.

At 36, I deeply wish from my country to be free of the monster than the union has become and deeply ressent being a prisoner of a monetary union which intentionally didn't plan an exit path. And for what? Surrendering the ability to make law to the citizen of other countries who share neither my language, nor my culture, clearly don't have the same vision of the future than us and wants to force us into their ineffective model? No, thanks. No GDP gains or alleged diplomatic weight is worth this debasement.

I don't understand Brexiters because being out of the euros they had the best of both worlds but I respect their desire to be truly sovereign and free from the constant Germanic hegemonic push.
by theK | 2026-02-21 13:35:17+00:00
> AI is great at allowing you not to write the dumb boiler plate we all could crank...

I've actually started having a different view on this. After getting over the "glancing instead of reading llm suggestions" phase I started noticing that even for simple or boilerplate tasks, LLMs all too often produce quite wasteful results regardless the setting or your subscription. They are OK to get you going but in the last weeks I haven't accepted one Claude, devstral or gpt suggestion verbatim. Nevertheless, I often throw them boilerplate tasks even though I now know that typically I'll end up coding 6 out of 10 myself and only use the other four as skeletons. But just seeing the "naive" or "generic" implementation and deciding I don't like it is a plus as it seems to compress the time of thinking about it by a good part.
by roysting | 2026-02-21 13:35:32+00:00
What makes you believe you have lost freedom of movement, I’ve met British people all over Europe. If I can meet a Russian living in Switzerland in Amsterdam and a British couple that took the ferry from the island, why are you not free to “move”?

On a related note; do you enjoy what America is right now? Because centralizing power and handing your country’s (American states are/were/should be essentially countries) sovereignty and self/determination to Brussels is how you get this, become the US of Europe, the next iteration in the centralized war machine of the psychopathic, narcissistic parasitic ruling class. When you lack diversity through separate, unique, district, and sovereign countries where people have oversight and control and can push back against horrible ideas and actions, you end up like us.

I’ve always found it unfortunate that the EU did not become a legitimate, constitutional form of the USA like it was before the Civil War that created this centralized authoritarian fake federal state that we know today. It would have been awe inspiring and really could have become the example for the rest of the world. Instead, the current version of the EU is strangling the whole continent.

The EU is right now talking about becoming a great military force to fight Russia. That’s the kind of movement you’re advocating for, my friend.

You think young people are kept down now, wait till they’re laying in some muddy battlefield as chopped meat or hiding from drone swarm or hypersonic missile attacks on their cities due to the belligerence of the EU aristocrats with no clothes.
by roryirvine | 2026-02-21 13:35:34+00:00
Mm, definitely. I think it's probably the cash crop that has historically been the most intertwined with politics, even more so than sugar.

Central America, the Balkans, the Levant. The Iroquois and Algonquians. Cuba. The Medicis and the Stuarts. And, as you say, revolutionary Virginia and Maryland. Lots of potential there for a grand narrative covering 600 years or more!

(And, to gp: yes, it absolutely did threaten governments, empires, and entire political systems!)
by vertnerd | 2026-02-21 13:36:10+00:00
I am not an MS Office user, but I have seen the effect of format lock-in with Google Sheets. A few months back I began a project to de-Google my life, which went pretty smoothly until I tried to download my spouse's accounting spreadsheet from Google Sheets to Excel format. Both LibreOffice and Excel could open it, but nothing worked correctly. So for several months, I kept that one Google Sheet live until I could come up with an alternative. When I created the original file in Sheets, I was blindly using all sorts of features and capabilities (including Google Forms) that simply have no direct analog in other products.

A couple of days ago I bit the bullet and dug into the Excel file and figured out how to redesign everything and get it going again. Yay me. I'll admit I don't like the UI in LibreOffice, but I didn't like it very much when I first tried using it (as Star Office) back in the 90s either. Yet I keep coming back to it.

If I'm going to be locked into a format or app, I'd rather it be something like LibreOffice.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-21 13:36:31+00:00
Having to use something like array[length] to get the last element demonstrates a defect of that programming language.

There are better programming languages, where you do not need to do what you say.

Some languages, like Ada, have special array attributes for accessing the first and the last elements.

Other languages, like Icon, allow the use of both non-negative indices and of negative indices, where non-negative indices access the array from its first element towards its last element, while negative indices access the array from its last element towards its first element.

I consider that your solution, i.e. using array[length] instead of array[length-1], is much worse. While it scores a point for simplifying this particular expression, it loses points by making other expressions more complex.

There are a lot of better programming languages than the few that due to historical accidents happen to be popular today.

It is sad that the designers of most of the languages that attempt today to replace C and C++ have not done due diligence by studying the history of programming languages before designing a new programming language. Had they done that, they could have avoided repeating the same mistakes of the languages with which they want to compete.