MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Piggzy – Turn your inbox into a universal 'Buy' button
by contactreddyk | 2026-02-17 03:10:59+00:00
Hi HN,

I grew tired of the research loop. I hated having 20 tabs open, comparing shipping speeds, and filling out the same checkout forms over and over. I realized that while the internet made shopping easier, it didn't necessarily make it faster.

I built Piggzy (piggzy.com) to be the invisible layer between your intent and your doorstep. The goal is to turn your inbox into a universal "Buy" button. No more passwords, no more tracking 10 different retail accounts, and no more out-of-stock frustrations.

How it works:

One-time setup: Secure your account and payment method at Piggzy.com.

Request via Email: Send a request to buy@piggzy.com (e.g., "Find the best noise-canceling headphones for a loud office under $250").

The Magic: We do the heavy lifting of finding the right item and email you the recommendation + cost breakdown.

Execution: You reply "Yes" or "Buy," and the agent handles the transaction.

Why Email?
I wanted to build a "headless" experience. I don't want to give you another dashboard to check. If you have an idea for something you need, you should be able to fire off an email and forget about it until the recommendation hits your inbox.

The Vision:
Right now, the focus is purely on the "hard work" of finding the right item and executing the purchase. I’m trying to solve the cognitive load of e-commerce.

I’ll be here all day to answer questions. I’m particularly interested in hearing your thoughts on:

The UX of email-based commerce.

Security expectations for agentic buying.

What specific "research loops" drive you the most crazy.

What can Piggzy find for you today?
by zachlatta | 2026-02-17 03:11:34+00:00
That’s awesome! The specific thing that was causing the long latency was the image LLM call to describe the current context. I’m not sure if you’ve tested Handy’s post-processing with images or if there’s a technique to get image calls to be faster locally.

Thank you for making Handy! It looks amazing and I wish I found it before making FreeFlow.
by lich_king | 2026-02-17 03:11:58+00:00
It's dark outside. I'm sitting in my living room with reasonable indoor lighting. I point my "Pro" phone camera on the tele setting (but no digital zoom) at the wall and take a photo. I zoom in on the capture and there is basically no real pixel detail anywhere in sight. It's all smudged to algorithmically cover up severe sensor noise. Crown moulding edges are not even straight lines and all have weird jaggies.

If I go and grab my full-frame mirrorless, every pixel of the image will be usable at 1:1 crop. "Taking photos indoors and wanting to zoom in and crop" is not an extreme test. The usability of 1:1 crops from cell phones is limited even in daylight.

But yeah, if you look at a photo taken in good light with no cropping and at screen display resolutions, it looks pretty close to the output from a pro mirrorless. My only point is that you get maybe 3-5 good megapixels, not 45+.

And that's before we get into dynamic range, bokeh, etc, all of which phones more or less need to fake to approach the look and feel of photos taken with grown-up cameras.
by fhdkweig | 2026-02-17 03:12:20+00:00
The United States military was apparently interested in the idea in a 2022 article, although I can't find any recent information on it.

https://qz.com/610131/the-us-military-will-pay-for-soldiers-...

https://www.progress.org.uk/us-military-to-offer-egg-and-spe...
by dboon | 2026-02-17 03:12:41+00:00
This is rude. Don't talk to people like this. It's a self proclaimed simple tool to solve a simple, recurrent problem in my life. It also gives you a config file that lets you clone and link on any machine, pulls on sync, and puts the links in a consistent place. Nothing about it is complex or hard. But it's useful, and it's free.

Being dismissive like this doesn't make you look cool, it just makes you look like a dick.
by brainless | 2026-02-17 03:12:57+00:00
More people are jumping in because of the thrill of it.

We are in the early days and I believe that things will get better as more people will calm the f down. People who have built things for ages will continue to do so, with or without coding agents.

In the long term, I think Open Source will win. I can imagine content management systems, eCommerce software, CRM, etc. to all become coding agent friendly - customer can customize the core software with agents and the scaffold would provide fantastic guardrails.

Self-hosting is already becoming way more popular than it ever was. People are downloading all sorts of tools to build software. Building is better. A structure needs to emerge.
by drdaeman | 2026-02-17 03:13:23+00:00
I think API specs are a wrong problem to solve. It’s usually pretty easy to reverse engineer an API requests and responses from a frontend or network log. What’s hard and what an OpenAPI (or any API, but machine-readable specs tend to suffer most) spec would be typically missing is the documentation about all the concepts and flows for using this API in a meaningful manner.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2026-02-17 03:13:51+00:00
Stradivarius instruments deserve being put on a pedestal for historical reasons. Stradivari basically defined the sound of the modern violin, using flatter arching and f holes with smaller hole areas than the Amatis, which resulted in a significantly more powerful instrument that was better suited to playing in a concert hall (vs. the chamber music of earlier times). Stradivarius violins are also noted for their extremely fine craftsmanship and attention to detail. The majority of modern violins are still modeled after Stradivarius examples (with a probably smaller number modeled after del Gesu instruments and some other makers). Most top soloists play on (heavily modified) Strads, and so it seems pretty clear that, at the very least, Strads are not holding any soloists back - and that is not the case for Amati instruments, for example, which despite being coveted for their age and history just don't have the same power and sound projection as Strads.

But, as other comments have said, there have been at this point a good slew of blind tests, and Strads are hardly ever recognized better than chance when compared to modern instruments, even when played by experts and judged by experts. People have been studying and modeling after Strads for so long it would be pretty shocking if we couldn't make instruments that sounded as good. In my mind that doesn't make Strads any less valuable - an original Picasso is still valued so highly because it was created by the master that invented Cubism, but that doesn't mean that a modern painter couldn't create a Cubist painting that was "just as good", objectively.
by ndiddy | 2026-02-17 03:13:53+00:00
The whole thing about people getting put on the sex offender registry for public urination is a myth and there's no verifiable cases of it happening. There are two cases that are relatively close. The first is James Birch, who pled guilty to indecent exposure for peeing on a Taco Bell because he was representing himself and didn't understand that meant he'd have to register as a sex offender. He realized his mistake and the court let him undo the plea and the charges were dropped. The second is Juan Matamoros, a meth dealer from Florida who claimed in the mid-2000s that the reason why he got put on the Massachusetts sex offender registry in the 80s was public urination. Due to the age of the case and Massachusetts privacy laws the court records aren't publicly available and his lawyer from the 80s responded to a request for interview about the case with "no judge I am aware of would allow someone to be put on the sex offender registry for peeing in public".

If anyone tells you that's why they're on the sex offender registry, it's extremely likely they're lying about it and you should really look them up.
by Brian_K_White | 2026-02-17 03:14:22+00:00
I still hate that they got away with deleting my linux partition on my PS3.

That was a completely useless instance of linux and I think it was only ever done to get around some kind of tax or tarrif on game systems vs generic computers, but those are both beside the point.

When I gave them the money, I no longer controlled the money. It remained and still remains fully functional for them after that and I did not get to reach into their bank accounts and remove part of it or even just control what they can and can't spend it on. They got 100% of everything expected out of an exchange of ownership. And they also got to retain partial control of the PS3! What a great gig!
by coip | 2026-02-17 03:14:27+00:00
If 80% is “done by the AI”, who is responsible for the certain failure on behalf of the AI? Given inference often is, >0%, wrong — in a word… hmm.

How many 9s until you’re comfortable? Even then, knowing 1000 tasks could likely have at least 1 foundational issue… how do you audit? “Pretty please do the needful” and have another “please ensure they do the needful”. Do you review the 1000 inputs/outputs processed? Don’t get me wrong, am familiar with the “send it” ethos all too well, but at-scale it seems like quite the pickle.

Genuinely curious how most people consider these angles… was tasked with building a model once to perform what literally could’ve otherwise been a SQL query… when I brought this up, it was met with “well we need to do it with AI” I don’t think a humans gonna want to find that needle in a haystack when 100,000 significant documents are originated… but I don’t have to worry about that one anymore thank goodness.
Looking for Founding Engineers – Esbern
by mochi_codes | 2026-02-17 03:15:47+00:00
Technical roles only.

Must be able to ship: code, infra, AI/LLM, API.
Location: Will happen either in Los Angeles or San Francisco (In-person needed - Full commitment needed)
Type/structure: Working together with 5 other genius programmers. Founding Team / Equity

Compensation: 5% equity + $100/day (For 60 days until investors onboard then pay raises) + $$$$ Bonus as backpay once ARR reached.

Timeline: 60-day sprint to MVP, then bring investors

THE MISSION
We're ending the tool monopoly.
We are unifying all the startups/small/medium SAAS/Tools into a unified native space where an AI layer brain operates seamlessly between all the tools via deep API. We can talk about the HOW and the structured plan approach during meetups.

For too long, Microsoft, Google, and every big corporate SaaS company has either bought or suppressed smaller SaaS companies. We are looking to end that, once in for all and put an end to money sucking corporate America. Unifying, giving the people a fighting chance against corporations.

The plan: Esbern is a unified native OS that makes EVERY tool work together under one native interface via API. AI-powered brain.

THE OFFER
If you believe you can change the world. If you're crazy enough to believe it, together with other crazy people including me can hopefully change the world for the better.

5% equity, stock options later on.

$100/day for 60 days - Survival money during MVP build (Until we get investors for pay raises)
Backpay Cash Bonus - Paid when we hit ARR, talk about the details on meetup.

Market salary after funding - Competitive pay rates and options once we close investors (45-60 days)
Founding team status - Your name in the history books

THE CATCH
This is war, not a comfortable job.
60 days, all in. $100/day won't cover your SF rent. You need to believe we can actually tear down the old system and build something better.
If we succeed: You helped end Big Tech's tool monopoly + generational wealth

If we fail: $4,500 AKA $100 per day, meet some crazy people, battle scars, and the new knowledge gained.

WHO WE WANT
People who are ANGRY that Big Tech has controlled tools for 20 years, F>> corporate America.

Builders who think "impossible" just means no one's done it yet.
Crazy enough to believe 5 people can change the entire industry/world
Based in LA or SF (we're building this in person)

Show us your GitHub, deployed projects, or technical portfolio."
Technical people only: Engineers who can BUILD: apps, AI/LLM integrations, API, infra etc…. Non-technical roles = don't apply.

APPLY
Send to: info@esbern.com
We can discuss about ourselves and how we got to this plan. We have a structured plan to go to market quickly using public API and existing tool stack people already use to enter the market and gain momentum.

Include:
GitHub profile if any, linkedin profile
Do you believe in our mission? Why
What's your technical superpower (Frontend, backend, full-stack, AI/ML, infrastructure, integrations, etc.?) What do you specialize in? Drop links if any.

Can you start in the next 2 weeks?
Where are you located?
by jesterson | 2026-02-17 03:15:53+00:00
> Zelenskyy could die tomorrow and Ukraine would keep fighting

That's your delusion and it has nothing to do with reality. Take out their army "recruiters" grabbing and beating people on streets, and there will be noone to fight anymore. No need even to take out zelenski.

> Your brain's been melted by Russian propaganda.

How predictable lol. So happy your "brain" is not melted by anything.
by koito17 | 2026-02-17 03:15:57+00:00
Immigration asks whether you've been arrested (even if not convicted) when applying for work visas and again when entering the country.

I have also applied to jobs for e.g. writing software for satellites, and I was explicitly asked if I had any criminal history (the specific wording was 前科履歴), among other questions, since the work is considered "security sensitive". These are knock-out questions before the first stage interview.

As for housing, criminal history questions aren't common, but the "anti-social organization" one definitely is.
Ask HN: Why is there a negative sentiment towards crypto?
by millarh3 | 2026-02-17 03:16:38+00:00
It seems to me like there’s an overall negative sentiment towards crypto here on HN. Why is this the case?

I get there’s a lot of false hype around various projects and the space has scams but looking beyond that, is it not a system that can disrupt existing financial system? Im taking about things like decentralised exchanges, RWAs, stablecoins, appear to be converging on allowing more people to participate in the financial markets without needing to go thru lengthy onboarding processes or engaging with brokers. The programmable factor also allows for there to be a platform for new ways of auntonomous transacting.

Do people tend to disagree with this vision or if not, why then would people here on HN have a negative view on crypto?
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2026-02-17 03:17:08+00:00
I understand what you're getting at, and I can appreciate it, but it's also kind of bullshit. You say "instruments have a sort of soul and that can inspire musicians which leads to better sound" - well, if that's the case, then people should be able to hear the difference in that sound in blind tests, which so far they basically haven't.
by xattt | 2026-02-17 03:20:27+00:00
The Idea Factory is a worthwhile read. One of the concepts that AT&T operated on during monopoly times seemed to be focused on providing a “gold-plated” premium service.

My understanding was that MCI rolled in and set up dollar-store version of Long Lines, with sound quality to match. They used that as the basis to challenge AT&Ts monopoly to steamroll shitty service everywhere.

The cream-skimming that happened with profit-first MCI resulted in the loss of a resilience mindset and long-term planning for a national network.
by arjunchint | 2026-02-17 03:20:55+00:00
We are still thinking through on the optimal usecases. Right now you can configure blocklists on url paths that the agent won't work on.

On the reliability front we offer integrations like Recordings to ground the agent on trajectories even as the underlying website updates and Knowledge Base of your whole domain.

You the website owner can provide additional guidance to the agent.
by verdverm | 2026-02-17 03:23:27+00:00
It's the ecosystem domination by crypto bros, they ruined it for everyone.

A lot of hammer looking for nails and the micro-financialization of everything. "Crypto" has been captured by Wallstreet and the oligarchs, Trump is using it for corruption. How much money did they print while crowing about what you find in the Bitcoin genesis block?

"allowing more people to participate in the financial markets" (*hit like this is a lie, it's really about being able to middleman and take a cut of every transaction, or leave them as the bag holders)

HN will find interest in various blockchain technologies extracted from the crypto. Things like using ZKP to have online safety while preserving privacy, that is an interesting intersection of HN fav topics.

Case in point, I find that Google is pushing on ZKP interesting and exciting: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-secu...

We're talking about similar in ATProto ecosystem
by JohnnyCode | 2026-02-17 03:24:23+00:00
I built DelegateOS because every agent framework today assumes all agents are trusted. CrewAI, AutoGen, LangGraph, MCP, A2A — none of them answer a basic question: when Agent A delegates to Agent B, what prevents B from accessing things A never intended?

The Google DeepMind delegation paper (arxiv.org/abs/2602.11865, Feb 2026) calls this out explicitly. MCP handles tool access, A2A handles agent communication, but nobody handles the trust and accountability layer between them. DelegateOS fills that gap with Ed25519-signed delegation tokens that enforce monotonic attenuation (sub-agents can only get narrower scope), budget caps across delegation chains, contract-based task verification, and cryptographic attestation chains for auditing.

It's a TypeScript library, MIT licensed, 374 tests passing. Ships with an MCP middleware plugin so you can drop it into existing MCP setups. The token format is inspired by Biscuit/Macaroons but purpose-built for agent delegation.

https://github.com/newtro/delegateos
by jv22222 | 2026-02-17 03:24:37+00:00
> Shift + Home/End for selecting text doesn't work
> Ctrl + N for a new page doesn't work

One thing that's weird is that things like that are so easy for me to implement it's just sugar on top. Honestly I would just love to have a few folks tinkering with it saying hey it needs these few things. Just hard for one dev to think of all the things!
by just6979 | 2026-02-17 03:25:17+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency-hopping_spread_spect..., combined with the inverse square law, is pretty amazing.

The amount of data needed to send audio to your ear-buds is quite small compared to the spectrum available, so only needs tiny slices of spectrum and for relatively tiny slices of time. And also relatively tiny amounts of power since it's only going max 100 feet, hence a pretty small chunk of space.

If all those 10K-30K devices are constantly jumping around the frequency band to transmit tiny payloads a tiny distance, then a whole metric fuck-ton of them can interoperate in what seems to us to be very tight quarters. But to those specialzied radios it probably seems like a fairly wide open field.
by devsda | 2026-02-17 03:25:43+00:00
If not for the accomplishments, advancements and potential benefits, the whole AI story since LLMs looks a lot like sophisticated DDOS attack at multiple levels.

AI bots are literally DDOS'ing servers. Adoption is consuming and making both physical and computing resources either inaccessible or expensive for almost everyone.

The most significant one is the human cost. We suddenly found ourselves dealing with overwhelming levels of AI content/code/images/video that is mostly subpar. May be as AI matures we'll find it more easy and have better tools to work with the volume but for now it feels like it is coming from bad actors even when it is done by well meaning individuals.

There's no doubt AI has its uses and it is here to stay but I guess we'll all have to struggle until we reach that point where it is a net benefit. The hype by those financially invested isn't helping a bit though.
by ggm | 2026-02-17 03:25:59+00:00
In 1982 I joined Leeds university as a computer operator/assistant. First job out of a CS degree in another uni. The department head was a laser physics specialist and I, and other snobs used to say "what does a laser man know about REAL computer science" and act outraged.

More fool us. More power to him. He was well ahead of the curve, him and his laser physics friends worldwide.
M Title: Show HN:P3 – AI Reputation-Based Lending
by packie | 2026-02-17 03:26:08+00:00
I’ve been building P3, a lending protocol that replaces FICO with AI-generated trust scores anchored on Ethereum. Each score snapshot is cryptographically hashed and verified before loan approval. Preparing for beta and looking for technical feedback on architecture, risk modeling, and regulatory blind spots.
by 8dazo | 2026-02-17 03:27:25+00:00
That's actually the goal! PhoneClaw isn't replacing the AI model; it's replacing the VPS.

Your AI can generate the code or the text (like the gym plan), but it needs a place to run 24/7 to actually execute tasks, save files, or interact with APIs. Usually, you'd pay for a cloud server to host that logic. PhoneClaw lets you host that execution layer on a spare phone you already own.
by bsder | 2026-02-17 03:27:45+00:00
> The first generation of programmers counted more women than men.

I have heard this before, but you need to back that up with more qualifiers.

There were a lot more female plug technicians because women were trained as phone operators. There were a lot more female keypunch operators because women were trained in typing to be secretaries. However, most people would not refer to those as "programmers" like we would definitely say for someone like Margaret Hamilton.
by hattmall | 2026-02-17 03:28:55+00:00
Yes, but your grandmother still died young. The future is one where fewer and fewer people reproduce but we have a far greater pace of longevity breakthroughs. The first humans to live to be 200 are almost certainly alive today, and in that 100 extra years the pace of innovation should increase and 200 will become young. The inevitable outcome is that machines will enslave humans, humans which never die and thus are trapped as slaves never reaching heaven. i.e. in hell. Constantly surveilled,too valuable to die and yet fully capable of experiencing pain, anguish and torment.

The alternative is that some sort of societal collapse resets humanity to a much lower technological level in which case your grandmother was likely also fortunate to have missed that.

The overall concept is that the only way to get to heaven is to leave earth. Thus, anyone who does that, has, from the perspective of those that remain and inevitably break the longevity barrier, died young.

Think of how disappointed the billions of souls in heaven, experiencing only peace and bliss, would be if their time on earth had increased 10x due antibiotics. It's not the dead who mourn, but the living.
by marcosdumay | 2026-02-17 03:32:20+00:00
> He also was dressed sharply.

As I said, it's context sensitive.

Personally, I stopped dressing nicely at work after way too many people assumed I'd throw ethics at the trash and do what they say for the hint of a small promotion. Weirdly, that never stopped the people that actually wanted to do things from talking with me.

But if you are talking to (potential) customers, the calculation is completely different.
by retrac | 2026-02-17 03:34:17+00:00
Bandwidth between Los Angeles and New York, very approximately:

1915: 1 kHz - telegraph lines

1925: 10 kHz - a handful of voice channels

1935: 100 kHz - several frequency multiplexed carrier lines across the desert

1945: 200 kHz - a few more lines - war time expansion restrictions

1955: 5 MHz - coaxial cable and microwave links

1965: 20 MHz - coast to coast simultaneous television and tens of thousands of voice channels

1975: 100 MHz - scaling up

1985: 10 GHz - analog to digital phase change - fibre optic and satellite

I still remember the first time I spoke to a person so far away the sun had set and risen in between.