MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wattsonme | 2026-02-21 17:48:04+00:00
Hey HN – I built TokenShrink, an npm package that compresses AI prompts to save tokens. Zero dependencies, runs
locally in <1ms.

After posting v1.0, r/LocalLLaMA tore it apart. They were right.

The problem: v1.0 estimated tokens as `words × 1.3`. But BPE tokenizers don't work that way. "database" is 1 token.
"db" is also 1 token. That replacement saves exactly nothing. Worse — "should" → "shd" goes from 1 token to 2. We were
making prompts MORE expensive.

What v2.0 does differently:

- Precomputed every dictionary entry against cl100k_base (GPT-4's tokenizer)
- Removed 130 entries that saved zero tokens
- Removed 45 entries that actually increased token count
- Replaced the word heuristic with a real token cost lookup table
- Added pluggable tokenizer support: `compress(text, { tokenizer })`

What it still does well — phrase compression. "In order to" → "to" saves 2 tokens. "Due to the fact that" → "because"
saves 4. "It is important to" → removed entirely. These multi-word filler phrases are where the real savings are.

Benchmarks (verified with gpt-tokenizer):

Verbose dev prompt: 408 → 349 tokens (14.5%)
Code review prompt: 210 → 183 tokens (12.9%)
Medical notes: 151 → 134 tokens (11.3%)
Business requirements: 143 → 121 tokens (15.4%)
Minimal filler: 77 → 77 tokens (0.0%)

No prompt had its token count increase. Zero false savings.

npm: npm install tokenshrink
Web: https://tokenshrink.com
GitHub: https://github.com/chatde/tokenshrink
by jedberg | 2026-02-21 17:49:50+00:00
>It doesn’t make any sense in 2026 that Gmail doesn’t have a dark mode

I've been using dark mode on gmail for years, not sure what OP is talking about here.

But also, my sleep quality got much better when I turned on f.lux. And it got better still when I added a second light to my bathroom that can do a 1800K super-warm light (that's also very dim).

And as an added pro-tip, I use f.lux during the day to cut my color temp to 5900K (instead of the default 6500K) and it made a huge difference for how long I could work without getting tired eyes.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-02-21 17:50:15+00:00
> Autopilots have contributed to a significant number of crashes and that’s with a very safety conscious industry.

"Contributed to", in the sense that the pilots decided to just blindly trust the autopilot and let it make a developing situation worse rather than, oh I don't know, maybe FLYING THE DAMN PLANE.

> buggy autopilots can surprisingly quickly get into a situation at cruising altitude which isn’t recoverable before hitting the ground

If you allow the autopilot to fly the plane into the ground, yes. If you're paying attention you ought to be able to recover just about anything, if most of the plane is still working. The vast majority of incidents where aircraft have departed controlled flight and crashed are because the pilots lost sight of the important thing - FLYING THE DAMN PLANE.

> But my point was lack of aerodynamic stability on its own isn’t enough that giving up is ok.

It's got nothing to do with aerodynamic stability. If you adjust the steering and suspension in a car correctly, it'll drive in a perfectly straight line with no user input for a surprisingly long way. With modern electronic power steering and throttle-by-wire systems it's actually surprisingly easy to turn an off-the-shelf car (even something cheap, secondhand, and quite old like a 2010s Vauxhall Corsa) into a simple line-following robot like we used to build at uni in the 80s and 90s in robotics class. Sure, you need a disused aerodrome to play with it, but it'll work.

There is the far greater problem that self-driving cars have to cope with a far more rapidly changing environment than an aircraft. A self-flying plane would be far easier to get right than a self-driving car.

A human driver can't just react, painfully slowly, in the way that current "self-driving" cars do, they have to anticipate and be "reacting" before the problem even begins to start. You do it yourself, even if you don't realise it. You hang back from that car because you know they're going to - there, right across two lanes, not so much as a glance in their mirror, what did I tell you? - they're going to do something boneheaded. That car's just pulled in, the passenger in the back is about to open their door right into your - nicely done, you moved out to the line and missed them by 50cm at least.

Self-driving cars can't do that, and probably never will. Self-flying aircraft won't need to do that.

And an autopilot is a surprisingly simple device that responds in simple and predictable ways to sensor inputs.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-21 17:50:32+00:00
It does provide an advantage when applying to remote jobs at some companies. They try to filter scammer applicants out early and the verified profile is one signal they look for.

Depends on the company, but in a competitive job market any extra signal can help.

There are a crazy number of fake LinkedIn profiles out there that are used for scamming companies or people.
by Betelbuddy | 2026-02-21 17:50:33+00:00
Your comment completely misses the point of my question. Those countries are regulating the title not the profession.

Here is the difference: the Doctors have a liability for their medical practice, the real Engineers meaning those doing Bridges and Buildings that can kill thousands of people if they fall, have a professional obligation and responsability on the outcomes of their designs and implementation.

I can guarantee you, no Software Engineer from Portugal to Germany will be willing to guarantee the behavior and fitness for purpose, of any System or Software product they develop :-) As you very well can see, if you bother to read the full details on the Software License disclaimers of any software from any large company. From Microsoft to Oracle, IBM and others.

As such those are Software Engineers on title only, what is convenient to be hired for post within Government and similar...
by aylmao | 2026-02-21 17:50:59+00:00
I'll note that Persona's CEO responded on LinkedIn [1] pointing out that:

- No personal data processed is used for AI/model training. Data is exclusively used to confirm your identity.
- All biometric personal data is deleted immediately after processing.
- All other personal data processed is automatically deleted within 30 days. Data is retained during this period to help users troubleshoot.
- The only subprocessors (8) used to verify your identity are: AWS, Confluent, DBT, ElasticSearch, Google Cloud Platform, MongoDB, Sigma Computing, Snowflake

The full list of sub-processors seems to be a catch-all for all the services they provide, which includes background checks, document processing, etc. identity verification being just one of them.

I have I've worked on projects that require legal to get involved and you do end up with documents that sound excessively broad. I can see how one can paint a much grimmer picture from documents than what's happening in reality. It's good to point it out and force clarity out of these types of services.

[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7430615...
by wasmperson | 2026-02-21 17:51:05+00:00
> How is that an unacceptable threat model for a repo of packages that are optional and user-made? One that clearly says, "DISCLAIMER: AUR packages are user produced content. Any use of the provided files is at your own risk." (1)

The AUR is an official part of Arch Linux. It's hosted on the archlinux.org domain with a prominent link to it from the main page. You enable package installation from it either using one of the many transparent pacman wrappers recommended in arch community spaces and on the arch wiki, or by ticking a checkbox in a graphical package manager like pamac. IMO a one-line disclaimer on the aur main page doesn't fix the problem at all.

Security isn't about the trustworthiness of the code you're running, it's about the trustworthiness of the person who's giving you the code. No matter how good you are at auditing bash scripts, there's a malicious bash script that will slip by you, even if you're diligent (which most aren't, even among so-called "power users"). With official packages, I have to trust the people who distribute my OS. With vendor-distributed software (Windows software, PPA, curl | sh) I have to trust the person who wrote the software. With the AUR, I have to trust the first person to park the name of the package.
by dhosek | 2026-02-21 17:51:08+00:00
I’d say we’ve already partly lost separate then/than. It’s sort of like how you can sometimes tell second-language speakers of a language because their grammar is much more precise than a native speaker’s would be (I have a vague notion that native French speakers tend to use third person plural where the textbooks inform French learners to use first person plural, but I’m too lazy to open another tab and google for the sake of an HN comment).
by edgarvaldes | 2026-02-21 17:51:18+00:00
Perhaps the whole cybersecurity theatre is just that, a charade. The frenzy for these tools proves it. IoT was apparently so boring that the main concern was security. AI is so much fun that for the vast majority of hackers, programmers and CTOs, security is no longer just an afterthought; it's nonexistent. Nobody cares.
by js2 | 2026-02-21 17:52:02+00:00
> a DTS person

Quinn the Eskimo, no doubt. I'm convinced he or she is the only actual human being providing developer technical support at Apple. Certainly the only one I've ever successfully communicated with. Support tickets go to robots who are incapable of providing relevant answers. Maybe Quinn is an alias with a team of humans behind it, but I don't think so. I've had him or her take forum posts to private e-mail and it does seem like a single person.

Unfortunately, even Quinn is fully at the mercy of Apple's internal bureaucracy, which is quite formidable.
by Jordan-117 | 2026-02-21 17:52:18+00:00
Specifically, they changed a "commenting as: [their alias]" UI element to "commenting as: [name of the blogger they were fighting with]".

Compare (the changed element is near the very bottom of the page; replace the "[dot]" since these URLs seem to trigger spam filters for some commenters):

archive [dot] is/gFD6Z

megalodon [dot] jp/2026-0219-1628-23/https://archive.is:443/gFD6Z
Show HN: MEO – a Markdown editor for VS Code with live/source toggle
by vadimmelnicuk | 2026-02-21 17:52:39+00:00
I write a lot of markdown alongside code: READMEs, specs, changelogs. VS Code's built-in experience is either raw syntax or a read-only preview pane you have to keep open in a split. Neither is great for actually writing.

MEO adds a proper editing mode to VS Code. You get a live/source toggle in a single tab, a floating toolbar for formatting, inline table editing, full-screen Mermaid diagram rendering, a document outline sidebar, and optional auto-save. No new app to switch to, no split pane.

One thing most markdown extensions miss: it preserves VS Code's native diff view, so reviewing git changes in a markdown file still works exactly as expected.

Built on VS Code's webview API.

Happy to answer any questions about it.

VS Code marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vadimmel...

GitHub repo: https://github.com/vadimmelnicuk/meo
by thegrim33 | 2026-02-21 17:53:03+00:00
How do you need to supervise this "less" than an LLM that you can feed input to and get output back from? What does it mean that it's "running continuously"? Isn't it just waiting for input from different sources and responding to it?

As the person you're replying to feels, I just don't understand. All the descriptions are just random cool sounding words/phrases strung together but none of it actually providing any concrete detail of what it actually is.
by basilgohar | 2026-02-21 17:53:05+00:00
It's not funny. It's a dag-gone jobs program. ICE, TSA, and more throw away billions to effect little but a heavy burden on the population. These organizations, FBI and other law enforcement included, invent crises and problems so as to secure even more funding.

Maybe the individual investigator in the story is excepted considering it seems he took it seriously, perhaps, but yes, a lot of money is intentionally thrown into these organizations for security theater, jobs programs, and padding the pockets of political friends and cronies.

What we should be worried about is how many legitimate threats fly under the radar because time and again these organizations have been proven to be highly ineffective at actually preventing what their charters mandate, but they can appear to be very visibly effective by incarcerating thousands of innocent people.
by jedberg | 2026-02-21 17:54:34+00:00
Except that I am into pottery, and I'm a parent into parenting stuff. But instead of just liking the stuff it was showing me, I made the extra effort to seek out that content and like more of it in an attempt to train the algo.

Also, as I mentioned elsewhere, this problem only started about two years ago, and I've had instagram for 15 years. So either they did something differently, or suddenly there was a lot more of that content, but I didn't change my habits.

Also, as a funny side note, scrolling my feed this morning was suddenly thirst-trap free for the first time in years.
by 120bits | 2026-02-21 17:54:47+00:00
> 8. Avoid hero culture. Build systems that don’t require heroes.

This right here is the what I always have encountered at every team I have ever worked. There will be a production outage, one person comes in and be like "Oh, let me do this.." Magically fixes things that was never documented becomes a hero and then we do a root cause analysis and then never address the fact that, what that one person knew that service that no one else on the team did.
by xyzzy123 | 2026-02-21 17:54:50+00:00
Yep there are more elements to it, which is sort of hard to explain.

There are whole cultures and ways of thinking built around production. The children of engineers who worked on xyz v1.0 have a genuine advantage when its time to work on xyz v2.0. There is a lot of tacit knowledge in these engineering fields and you have a huge advantage in knowledge retention if you can maintain unbroken chains of succession.

You can't achieve the top levels of ability (decades of experience, generational knowledge) if you are whip-sawing production to and fro across the globe every 10 years.

There are also cross pollination effects. Being in the same community with as many related fields as possible (co-located) is what drives cross-pollination and mobility of ideas and people between industries.

Think how many countries have tried to copy "silicon valley" and failed, and _why_ they failed.

What I'm saying is that technology is built by _people_ and there are human reasons why having local capacity is beneficial for all the related industries in the area.
by pousada | 2026-02-21 17:54:58+00:00
My point was not that I’m 100% convinced that LLMs can think or are intelligent.

My point was that we don’t have a great definition for (human) intelligence either. The articles you posted also don’t seem to be too confident in what human intelligence actually entails.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence

> There is controversy over how to define intelligence. Scholars describe its constituent abilities in various ways, and differ in the degree to which they conceive of intelligence as quantifiable.

Given that an LLM isn’t even human but essentially an alien entity, who can confidently say they are intelligent or not?

I’m very sceptic of those who are very convinced one or the other way.

Are LLMs intelligent in the way that humans are? I’m quite sure they aren’t.

Are LLMs just stochastic parrots? I don’t find that framing convincing anymore either.

Either way it’s not clear, just check how this topic is discussed daily in most frontpage threads for the last couple of years
by godelski | 2026-02-21 17:55:58+00:00
> He literally said those exact words out loud from the audience during a job talk.

Yes, I even provided the source...

Unfortunately despite being able to provide a summary I'm unable to actually read it for you. You'll actually need to read the whole thing and interpret it. You have a big leg up with my summary but being literate or not is up to you. As for me, I'm not going to argue with someone who chooses not to read
by kuboble | 2026-02-21 17:56:30+00:00
The example from yesterday:

I have a large C# application. In this application I have a functionality to convert some group of settings into a tree model (a list of commands to generate this tree). There are a lot of weird settings and special cases.

I asked claude to extract this logic into a separate python module.

It succesfully one-shot that, and I would estimate it as 2 days work for me (and I wrote the original C# code).

This is probabaly the best possible kind of task for the coding agents, given that it's very well defined task with already existing testcases.
by schrodinger | 2026-02-21 17:56:40+00:00
FYI -- Because of this, Apple made a feature where if you click the power button 5 times, your phone goes into "needs the passcode to unlock" mode.

Whenever I'm approaching a border crossing (e.g. in an airport), I'm sure to discreetly click power 5 times. You also get haptic feedback on the 5th click so you can be sure it worked even from within your pocket.
by feelamee | 2026-02-21 17:57:28+00:00
your words...
> C++ implementations of defer are either really ugly

I agree with @pjmlp - you need to write wrappers around the C api.

But if you..
> If I'm gonna write RAII wrappers around every tiny little thing that I happen to need to call once

use them just once.. so, why care about ugliness, just write ugly code just once? Code can't be perfect.
by dboreham | 2026-02-21 17:58:06+00:00
It wasn't a rocket science amazing idea in 1989. It was a pretty obvious thing anyone in the space could see would be interesting to try -- hypertext already existed. The internet was just taking off. The idea that you could host pages that hyperlinked to each other on the internet was totally obvious and if you'd explained it to anyone active in the internet at the time (obviously not that many of those people), they'd have nodded. I should add that almost nobody had a computer with a graphics display in 1989 (I did, at work) so that further constrains the set of folk to whom the idea would make sense. The fact that everyone now has many 64-bit computers with extremely high resolution displays is probably the more surprising thing to 1989-dude.
by bigyabai | 2026-02-21 18:00:12+00:00
We have mobile Linux. It's only supported on less than a dozen handsets and runs like shit, but we have it already.

The reason nobody uses mobile Linux is that it has to compete with AOSP-derived OSes like LineageOS and GrapheneOS, which don't suck or run like shit. This is what it looks like when people vote with their dollars, people want the status-quo we have (despite the horrible economic damages).
by nine_k | 2026-02-21 18:02:17+00:00
A LinkedIn account's sole purpose is publishing, dissemination, and advertising information about you and your company. Anything that you badly want to keep private certainly does not belong there, much like it does not belong to a large roadside billboard.

Otherwise, LinkedIn can be quite useful in searching for a job, researching a company, or getting to know potential coworkers or hires.

Email spam is, to my mind, an inevitability. You should expect waves of spam, no matter what address you use; your email provider should offer reasonable filtering of the spam. Using a unique un-guessable email address, like any security through obscurity, can only get you so far.
by riku_iki | 2026-02-21 18:02:41+00:00
> The children of engineers who worked on xyz v1.0 have a genuine advantage when its time to work on xyz v2.0.

my point is that other children with no extremely heavy investments into perl v1.0, will have some skills in c++ v1.0 and python v1.0, and will have advantage in adapting Tensorflow v1.0, which is more valuable than skills in perl v2.0. Heavily investing in one industry you sacrifice some flexibility.

So, this is multifactor analysis, lets say wise American people will elect me as next president, I would create list of industries, assign metrics (national security importance, potential revenue in 5y from now, impact on other industries, potential margin, risks of failure, etc), then build some formula which aggregate those metrics into single, and base on final metric allocate weighted funds to support N top industries.
by Smartchat | 2026-02-21 18:02:48+00:00
Well, that's the only name they removed, even though it didn't stand out among the other names in the investigation. Secondly, it's ironic to do so in an article tagged "Streisand Effect" so perhaps we're witnessing part of the performance. And thirdly, it's strange to blame AT for removing... the same name, and not blame Ars. Immediately accusing... AT of double standards and hypocrisy.

I am lost here. It is definitively an organized defamation campaign.

“You are guilty simply because I am hungry”
by matheusmoreira | 2026-02-21 18:03:49+00:00
Fraud prevention. If they lock things down, they lose less money to fraud. I think they should just have to suck it up and eat the cost but obviously they don't think that way. Only a small minority even understands and cares about these issues. The money they save by trampling over our freedom is no doubt much higher than the value brought in by us. They will no doubt sacrifice us for increased profits if we force the issue. We have no leverage.

There is no reason whatsoever for a major corporation to not use remote attestation technology. Banks will use it because fraud. Streaming services will use it because piracy. Messaging services will use it because spam, bots. If you're the corporation, the user is your enemy and you want to protect yourself from him.

Governments want this too. Encryption. Anonymity. They need to control it all. Free computers are too subversive for them. They cannot tolerate it.
by fweimer | 2026-02-21 18:03:50+00:00
The IEEE 754 standard covers decimal floating point arithmetic, too. Decimal floating point avoids issues like 0.1 + 0.1 + 0.1 not being equal to 0.3 despite usually being displayed as 0.3. Maybe it's reasonable to use that instead?

Some earlier spreadsheets such as Multiplan used it (but not in the IEEE variety) because it was all soft-float for most users anyway.
by griffineyes | 2026-02-21 18:04:46+00:00
It’s definitely not a fluke. I was getting between 20 and 30 spam emails per day. Simply out of curiosity I deleted my linkedin account and the spam abated. After a week the spam reduced to a trickle and now after a few months I only get a few spam emails per week. Shortly after discovering that LinkedIn was the problem I deleted Indeed as well. Indeed has a fairly robust data deletion program.
by jpeeler | 2026-02-21 18:04:48+00:00
I've been collecting a list of sandboxing related projects as well, some lower level than others. I wish I had time to evaluate them all:

- https://github.com/jingkaihe/matchlock

- https://github.com/mishushakov/libkrun-go

- https://github.com/earendil-works/gondolin

- https://github.com/butter-dot-dev/bvisor

- https://github.com/amlalabs/amla-sandbox

- https://github.com/eryx-org/eryx

- https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap (not new)

- https://github.com/coplane/localsandbox

- https://github.com/sd2k/conch

- https://github.com/Gerharddc/litterbox

- https://github.com/finbarr/yolobox

- https://github.com/coventry/sandbox-codex

- https://github.com/osks/ctenv

- https://github.com/tianon/gosu

- https://github.com/colony-2/shai

- https://github.com/rcarmo/agentbox

- https://github.com/coder/httpjail

- https://github.com/bytecodealliance/componentize-py

- https://github.com/tursodatabase/agentfs

- https://github.com/always-further/nono

- (another list on HN Deno Sandbox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46876022)

- Did not check if any/all of these are here: https://github.com/arjan/awesome-agent-sandboxes