MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by andsoitis | 2026-02-19 13:46:19+00:00
> In my view, the resolution of this thought experiment would shed light on many of the claims being made about the ability for AI to accelerate science. Recently, there have been multiple claims of AI systems making scientific discoveries or proving theorems. It is usually difficult to assess whether these are incremental or significant, and the degree to which an AI generated the insight

Specialization and abundance of information have created siloing, less interdisciplinary work. To make breakthroughs in physics, you have to spend the better part of your life studying things like string theory or quantum field theory, and then you still don't know anything about other fields.

Scientific insights, I bet, will come from AI sifting through the data as well as the knowledge and make novel connections that any one human or even a group of humans would struggle to make, if make at all. I can imagine how humans can then build on these new insightful connection to make further leaps that AI can then build off of again.

One thing that puts a limit on the pace of scientific progress is the verification and experimentation parts. While AI can theoretically make discoveries authonomously in fields like mathematics, for physics, biology, medicine, and many other fields, you need to interact with the physical world (experiments, trials), so the breakthrough loop can't accelerate "infinitely".

Robotics can address some of that, but there will remain physical limits, I anticipate.
by abustamam | 2026-02-19 13:46:27+00:00
My wife is petite (4'11") and always struggled to find clothes that fit her. She dresses conservatively because we're Muslim but she doesn't really like wearing the long gowns that many Muslim women wear, so she wears jeans and long sleeved shirts.

Anuway, she always struggled to find clothes that fit her well because she's small. Her uncle had to tailor a lot of her clothes growing up. A while back she found a fashion-as-a-service called Short Story, which markets itself for petite women; it basically sends her clothes every X-months and she tries them on and send back the ones she doesn't like or fit, tells her stylist why she is sending them back, and pays for the ones she keeps. Every time she keeps something from them she donates something from her wardrobe (net zero is the goal). And she looks great in them! They're fashionable (to the degree that my dev opinion on fashion matters), modest, and most importantly they fit her well.

Disclosure: I interviewed with Short Story last year as a consulting role but it didn't pan out.
by staticassertion | 2026-02-19 13:46:31+00:00
I'll need you to be much more specific. I'm actually quite familiar with Rust, having worked with it since 2015, speaking at the first rustconf, having written in it professionally, having worked on a team that did vulnerability research with a highly hardened Rust codebase[0] in which `unsafe` usage introduced a vulnerability, etc.

If you'd like me to construct a formal syllogism to communicate my points then I might be able to abide. You first though because I find it utterly ridiculous to complain about "logical errors" in what I've written when your post made numerous unsupported or seemingly irrelevant claims.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20221001182026/https://www.grapl...
by nerdjon | 2026-02-19 13:47:10+00:00
Then I would not use it because it does not work the way I want it to work...

But if that is the service they are making and they are clear about what it is when you sign up... That does not make it illegal.

I can see why people think they should be entitled to do this, but it does not align with how they are selling the service or how many other companies sell services. In most situations you don't get unlimited access to the individual components of how a service works (the API), you are expected to use the service (in this case Claude Code) directly.
by t_null | 2026-02-19 13:47:14+00:00
I built *erxi*, a Rust implementation of *EXI* (W3C Efficient XML Interchange)

Write-up with benchmarks and context: https://hahn.website/blog/erxi

Main goal: XML/EXI interoperability with good performance and memory usage, without requiring a JVM runtime.

Current status:
- Rust encoder/decoder with interoperability testing
- Big improvements over my initial versions in runtime and memory
- EXI4JSON implementation (JSON workflows can be bridged into EXI)
- Good baseline for further tooling

Next thing I’m considering is where to focus next. Would you prefer:

1. *Visualization/translator tooling*
XML/JSON <-> EXI with a debuggable event/structure view.

2. *More of the XML stack in Rust*
XML parsing, XSD parsing, validation, etc.

If you had to pick one first, which would you want and why?
by prabal97 | 2026-02-19 13:47:47+00:00
BTW - we used Gemma 270m model - not the 1B model. It's sheerly the size - I wanted to see if I could get a really, really tiny LLM to generate coherent music. Tbh, it didn't quite work as well as I expected. It barely beats a randomly generated track.

In fact, the 'fast' model (literally embedding lookup over a pre-generated library of music ... generated using Best-of-N on Gemini Flash) beats nearly everything - including Gemini Flash, Claude Opus, Gemma models.
Show HN: I created an app to remove Reels, now on iOS too
by adrianhacar | 2026-02-19 13:49:17+00:00
Last year I built an Android app to block Reels and Shorts while keeping "healthy" features like stories and DMs. I didn't want to block the whole app. I just wanted to message friends and see their posts without losing an hour scrolling on Reels. This was the HN post for the Android version: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44923520

When people asked for an iOS version, I thought it was not possible. Apple is way more restrictive and doesn't allow that level of app access.

But I ended up building the iOS app using a different approach. On iOS, it uses WebApps. It's not exactly the same experience as the native app, but it works surprisingly well.

I also combined it with iOS Shortcuts to auto-redirect the native apps to WebApps, so I can keep Instagram installed for notifications but get sent to the WebApp without Reels and any feed when I tap.

Curious what you think, especially about the WebApp approach on iOS.
by pjc50 | 2026-02-19 13:49:45+00:00
Not sure about that; why does the US have a huge number of troops in Germany in the first place? Defence, or occupation?

It seems to me that the objectives until ~2014 were to (a) provide moral and a small amount of physical support for the War on Terror; (b) sell US weapons, such as the F-35; and (c) ensure that European defence centered around NATO, under US control, and not the EU. The US wanted Europe to have enough capability to assist the US, but not to go off on adventures of its own and certainly not (going all the way back to the Washington Naval Treaty here) enough military might to resist the US or start another European empire.

That is, the strategy from WW2 until fairly recently was to prevent Germany re-arming. Just as the large deployment in Japan is to prevent Japan from re-arming just as much as it is there to defend the Pacific from China.
by myrmidon | 2026-02-19 13:51:18+00:00
I find it quite interesting how particular languages seem to disproportionally attract specific kinds of projects.

From a first glance, this is the second somewhat opinionated, compact, minimal-dependency interpreter/shell/library bundle despite the Lua(JIT) ecosystem being tiny. The other example I have in mind for this would've been luapower, which sadly became somewhat inactive.

I really like the simplicity of the language and the speed and compactness of its implementation. The JIT is also the real deal, with millisecond cold start execution delays unlike Julia, which masquerades as a JIT/interpreted language while featuring dog slow (by comparison) LLVM ("pre-")compilation under the hood (core language, type system, package management and interoperability concepts are admittedly nice in Julia though).
by kovacivan | 2026-02-19 13:51:32+00:00
Great questions.

You don't need to open your DB to the entire internet. We provide a static IP for you to whitelist in your firewall. And yes, the connection string is used to create a restricted 'read-only' user for the backup process.

Valid point on the docs. I will change it definitely. You shouldn't have to create an account to see our security posture.

For storage, you’re right on the raw numbers, but in practice, database dumps compress incredibly well. We use Gzip compression so a 100MB SQL dump typically ends up around 15-20MB on disk. For a side project or a small SaaS with a few hundred MBs of data, 2GB actually provides a very comfortable ceiling for a 32-day rotation.

To be clear, Oops Backup is not an enterprise solution. If you’re managing a multi-terabyte production cluster with strict compliance needs, we aren't your tool. We built this for indie hackers, hobbyists, and small-to-medium side projects where a 2GB total footprint is the norm, not the exception. It’s for the person who just wants to spend 2 minutes setting up a safety net for their $20/month VPS database.
by iammjm | 2026-02-19 13:51:53+00:00
Violence sometimes absolutely is the right response. Let me quote some George Orwell:

"Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. "

source: https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/pacifism/english/e_pa...
by chii | 2026-02-19 13:52:04+00:00
This is the macroscopic outcome that also play out in a company microcosm - people who _prevent_ disasters and fix problems _before_ they occur get no credit, and on the balance sheet it looks like they're just a waste of resources.

On the big scale, like in gov't, the disasters that did not happen end up also not getting any credit to the institutions and regulators, so on the budget it feels (to uninformed voters) that these departments are simply wasting taxpayer money.
by veunes | 2026-02-19 13:52:11+00:00
You don't need frameworks for one-off scripts, but in prod, you're going to need RAG, proper memory, tools, and orchestration anyway. Without standards you'll just end up writing your own janky framework on top of requests. LangChain is definitely a bloated mess, but it provides structure. The beauty of Elixir is that this structure (OTP) is baked into the language, not duct-taped on the side
by hagbard_c | 2026-02-19 13:52:23+00:00
Neither can the fraudsters [1] and it is equally irrelevant in the context of discussing either fraud - which is real and substantial - or any of the attempts to keep it out of the public eye. Discuss DOGE by all means but don't let it distract from tackling the fraud issues. Also try to keep the discussion factual without using too many labels and/or epithets.

[1] https://www.learing.center/
Ask HN: Why don't we have a global, unified database for scam reputation?
by mysocialguard | 2026-02-19 13:52:44+00:00
We have global protocols for email (SMTP), global databases for IP reputation (Spamhaus), and global ledgers for money (Crypto).

Yet, when it comes to scam prevention, the data is incredibly fragmented. If a scammer uses a specific Telegram handle, a leaked bank account, and a crypto wallet to defraud someone, that data stays in isolated silos or restricted private databases. By the time one platform flags them, they’ve already moved to the next one.

I’ve been thinking about a community-driven "reputation layer" for digital identities. A place where a bank account reported in one country can be flagged for a crypto user in another, instantly.

I’m curious to hear from the HN community:
1. Is a decentralized, community-voted scam database viable, or will it always be gamed by malicious actors?
2. Why haven't big tech or financial institutions built a cross-platform API for this yet?
3. How do we balance the "right to be forgotten" with the public's need to be protected from repeat offenders?

I’ve started building a platform to address this called MySocialGuard (mysocialguard.com), using a community voting and comment system to verify reports across bank/crypto/social handles/phone number/e-wallet.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on whether this "decentralized trust" approach is the right way forward or if there’s a better technical architecture I should consider.
by Aldipower | 2026-02-19 13:53:06+00:00
I had to look this very interesting word up now. And it is spread all around the Germanic languages and is directly derived from the verb "to stand" (en), "stehen" (de) or "at stå" (dk). Which is funny, because you sit on something that stands. :-)

> I wonder if the German language took the second meaning back from English later, or if they both developed at the same time for the same reason at a point when there was shared influence between English and German royal courts.

I would bet on the second one!
by tomwojcik | 2026-02-19 13:53:22+00:00
Hi HN, I've been using Claude Code heavily for the last year. Recently I've noticed a shift in sentiment among peers, here on HN, and over on /r/ExperiencedDevs. I wrote down some thoughts on the hidden costs of using AI too much that are not obvious, yet there's no concrete data yet. I tried to pull together data from a few different places to articulate something I think a lot of us are experiencing right now. I'd love to hear your thoughts
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-02-19 13:54:07+00:00
Funny you should ask that. I'm retiring today.

But turn on "showdead" and read nivcmo's top-level reply. Or if you won't, here's what for me was the most important line:

> Smaller teams, clearer missions, direct customer relationships. That's the antidote.

Maybe, after a few months off, I'll be open to that, if I can find it.
by qsi | 2026-02-19 13:54:07+00:00
Some of the best ST software came from Germany, where the it had a high market share driven by DTP applications. IIRC at one point the ST had a bigger installed DTP base in Germany than the Mac.

There was an annual fair in Düsseldorf, the Atari ST Messe, which was impressive in its size. I went for several years in a row until the ST sadly started losing its relevance.
by anuveyatsu | 2026-02-19 13:54:41+00:00
Most data questions in chat are not “build me a dashboard.”

They’re:
– “Are we up or down?”
– “How do revenue vs costs compare?”
– “What’s the trend over the last 7 days?”

So we added ASCII/Unicode charts directly into chat responses. Emoji + block bars for comparisons, sparklines for trends. No render delay, no context switch, works in Slack/Telegram/WhatsApp, readable on mobile.

Example:

Revenue $97k
Costs $61k
Profit $36k

Sales (7 periods):

If you want a full interactive report, you can still ask for it — but the default is fast visual feedback in chat.

Curious what HN thinks:
Is this a step forward for conversational analytics, or just clever formatting?

Happy to answer technical questions.
by sleepyguy | 2026-02-19 13:55:40+00:00
The Mongols didn't build shit,they conquered empty fields and enslaved and killed everyone they came across. They built nothing of value and ended up dying on the Dung heaps of Asia where they were born. Their only legacy today is Russian Culture which never embraced Greek Wisdom and Western values and maintained it Mongol roots as can be seen today and currently on display in Ukraine.
by almostdeadguy | 2026-02-19 13:55:56+00:00
> 1. How will you know it's a bot?
> 2. How will you know the model?

Sounds like a problem for the platforms and model vendors to figure out!

> Do you want to target the model authors or the LLM providers? If company X is serving an LLM created by academic researchers at University Y, will you go after Y or X? Or both?

I mean providers are obviously my primary concern as the people selling something to the public, but sure, why not both.

> Ouch. Throw due process out the door!

There's lots of prior art for this, let's not pretend like this is something new. The NLRB adjudicates labor complaints and disputes, the DoT adjudicates complaints about airlines, etc.

> This is more reasonable, but for the fact that the bots can simply state the wrong model, or change it daily.

Once again, sounds like a problem for the platforms to figure out! How do they handle spammers and abusers today? Throw up their hands? Guess they won't be able to do that for long!

> Unfortunately, the simple reason your proposal will fail is that if country X does it, they'll be left far behind country Y that doesn't. It's national suicide to regulate in this fashion.

Sounds like a diplomatic problem, if it actually is a problem. In reality the social harms of AI may exceed any supposed benefits. The optimistic case seems to be that AI becomes so powerful it causes a massive hemorrhaging of jobs in knowledge work (and later other forms of work). Still waiting to see any social benefits!
Show HN: EloLup – guess reactions to short videos instead of scrolling them
by Strugly | 2026-02-19 13:56:30+00:00
For each video, you guess how others react by dropping a point on a 2D pad: Y represents resonance with the content, X represents certainty in that resonance.

The closer your guess is to the crowd’s evolving consensus (which is itself based on others’ guesses), the higher your score. These scores then aggregate into your intuition level - a metric that allows content consumers to be compared.

The idea is to turn the current passive scrolling state of social media into a prediction game where users can compete for social capital through prediction skill rather than content production alone.
by NooneAtAll3 | 2026-02-19 13:56:45+00:00
> but what is it actually implying? That the student is unsure whether the surgeon killed all his patients?

yes, exactly that?

it's a parable about null hypothesis - without data to compare against we have no idea whether new procedure is actually any good (as in, better)

in reality conversation would (should) soon turn towards observations by other surgeons, general death rate of the disease or even some basic theory - but simply saying "they would've died, trust me bro" is not it

also note that surgeon is overreacting. "set aside" does not automatically mean "do nothing" - control group should probably be given previous accepted version of treatment, as that's what the new idea is trying to replace
by mothballed | 2026-02-19 13:56:52+00:00
This is hilarious, because we agree completely, but because I didn't phrase things in a way that spoon fed your delicate baby sensibilities you decided to go on a tantrum, and possibly even flag it despite you're the one that initiated breaking the rules here by straight up accusing me of lying when I have told the truth.

Also please look up what a "draco" is because it looks you look like a moron when you say it's improper to characterize it as an AK.
by saezbaldo | 2026-02-19 13:57:03+00:00
Hi HN. I built IC-AGI because every AI agent framework I looked at gives the agent full authority once it gets an API key. That's fine for demos but scary for anything touching production data or infrastructure.

IC-AGI splits authority using K-of-N threshold approval (Shamir Secret Sharing). No single node, human or AI, can unilaterally execute a critical action. Capability tokens have TTL, scope, and consumable budgets, so an agent can only do what it was explicitly authorized to do, for a limited time, within a spending cap.

The part I'm most interested in feedback on: I formally verified 14 safety properties using TLA+ model checking (~50K states, ~250K property checks) plus 8 algebraic proofs for the Shamir implementation. Zero violations. If you work with TLA+ or formal methods, I'd love to hear if my specs are sound or if I'm missing edge cases.

Stack: Python, Shamir SSS over GF(p), HMAC-SHA256, FastAPI control plane, K8s manifests for distributed workers. 273 tests including adversarial attacks (replay, MITM, oracle extraction, code injection). Apache 2.0.

Longer writeup with the threat model: https://dev.to/saezbaldo/every-ai-agent-framework-trusts-the...

Happy to answer questions about the architecture or the formal verification approach.
by pu_pe | 2026-02-19 13:57:18+00:00
You are right that this is a niche subject, I doubt that he would be able to place his name as the best soccer player or whatever.

However, a lot of commercially important things are niche. Who is the best lawyer in [<100,000 people town], etc. I think it's a valid point that you can just lie your ass off and Google will AI-wash that into some summary that gives it more authority than it should.
by veunes | 2026-02-19 13:57:25+00:00
The asymmetry is brutal: generating slop costs pennies and five seconds, while reviewing it costs senior engineers hours. The natural filter of complexity is broken, so the only way out is to artificially reintroduce friction

Projects like Godot need to enforce a strict Proof of Work. Want your PR reviewed? Attach a video of the fix running or a profiler log. If you can't prove you ran the code locally, a bot should auto-close the ticket. Otherwise they're just going to drown
by Dwedit | 2026-02-19 13:57:27+00:00
NTDLL should be stable since it's well documented, and many functions redirect to Ntoskrnl.exe, and things like kernel level drivers call those functions. Those functions won't change without the drivers breaking.

Then there's "Win32u.dll". These correspond to API calls from User32.dll, Gdi32.dll, etc. This DLL didn't even exist during the Windows 2000-XP era. This stuff is not well documented, and I don't know if this is stable.
by felixding | 2026-02-19 13:57:37+00:00
Very cool project!

When I was still working at a large corporation, I built an internal "social" radio station using Icecast2. I'd broadcast my favorite music like Pink Floyd and Radiohead to my coworkers via a simple Rails web app, and we'd chat about music, work, and everything in between on the same web app. That was a long time ago, and I no longer have that environment (a big company with lots of similar-minded young people), but live-streaming music with friends will always be a soft spot in my heart.
by kranner | 2026-02-19 13:58:00+00:00
Great and important work!

This is related to why current Babelfish-like devices make me uneasy: they propagate bad and sometimes dangerous translations along the lines of "Traduttore, traditore" ('Translator, traitor'). The most obvious example in the context of Persian is of "marg bar Aamrikaa". If you ask the default/free model on ChatGPT to translate, it will simply tell you it means 'Death to America'. It won't tell you "marg bar ..." is a poetic way of saying 'down with ...'. [1]

It's even a bit more than that: translation technology promotes the notion that translation is a perfectly adequate substitute for actually knowing the source language (from which you'd like to translate something to the 'target' language). Maybe it is if you're a tourist and want to buy a sandwich in another country. But if you're trying to read something more substantial than a deli menu, you should be aware that you'll only kind of, sort of understand the text via your default here's-what-it-means AI software. Words and phrases in one language rarely have exact equivalents in another language; they have webs of connotation in each that only partially overlap. The existence of quick [2] AI translation hides this from you. The more we normalise the use of such tech as a society, the more we'll forget what we knew we didn't know.

[1] https://archive.fo/iykh0

[2] I'm using the qualifier 'quick' because AI can of course present us with the larger context of all the connotations of a foreign word, but that's an unlikely option in a real-time mass-consumer device.