MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by _alternator_ | 2026-02-13 21:07:24+00:00
Right on with special relativity—Lorentz also was developing the theory and was a bit sour that Einstein got so much credit. Einstein basically said “what if special relativity were true for all of physics”, not just electromagnetism, and out dropped e=mc^2. It was a bold step but not unexplainable.

As for general relativity, he spent several years working to learn differential geometry (which was well developed mathematics at the time, but looked like abstract nonsense to most physicists). I’m not sure how he was turned on to this theory being applicable to gravity, but my guess is that it was motivated by some symmetry ideas. (It always come down to symmetry.)
by mrguyorama | 2026-02-13 21:07:27+00:00
Cops are legally forbidden from surveilling everyone at all times using machines. Explicitly so. Yet, if a company starts up and surveils everyone at all times, and their only customer is Cops, it's all Okay somehow. The cops don't even need a warrant anymore.

What's worse, is that third party doctrine kills your rights worse than direct police surveillance.

Imagine if you will, back in the day of film cameras: The company developing your film will tell the police if you give them literal child porn but otherwise they don't. But imagine if they kept a copy of every picture you ever took, just stuffed it into a room in the back, and your receipt included a TOS about you giving them a license to own a copy "for necessary processing". Now, a year after you stopped using film cameras, the cops ask the company for your photos.

The company hands it over. You don't get to say no. The cops don't need a warrant, even though they 100% need a warrant to walk into your home and grab your stash of photos.

Why is this at all okay? How did the supreme court not recognize how outright stupid this is?

We made an explicit rule for video rental stores to not be able to do this! Congress at one time recognized the stupidity and illegal nature of this! Except they only did that because a politician's video rental history was published during his attempt at confirmation.

That law is direct and clear precedent that service providers should not be able to give your data to the cops without your consent, but this is America so precedent is only allowed to help businesses and cops.
by w10-1 | 2026-02-13 21:07:28+00:00
Thank you for the re-orientation...

> this is an exaggeration for fictional purposes

To me what's horrifying is that this is not exaggeration. The language and thinking are perfectly in line with business considerations today. It's perfectly fair today e.g., for Amazon to increase efficiency within the bounds of the law, because it's for the government to decide the bounds of coercion or abuse. Policy makers and business people operate at a scale that defies sympathy, and both have learned to prefer power over sentiment: you can force choices on voters and consumers, and get more enduring results for your stakeholders, even when you increase unhappiness. That's the mirror on reality that fiction permits.
by tempestn | 2026-02-13 21:07:52+00:00
I'm curious why my experience with Windows 11 is so different from what I regularly read. It was some years ago now, so I don't remember exactly what configuration steps I went through, but presumably I turned off ads when I first installed. And so, I don't get ads. I don't recall ever seeing an ad embedded in Windows. Are people talking about Edge (which I don't use) or inside the Microsoft Store (which I very rarely use, but I presume does have sponsored apps or whatever)? Or is this mostly people who don't use Windows, repeating what others have said? Or are these ads targeted at users who aren't me?
by louiereederson | 2026-02-13 21:07:55+00:00
Big tech might ahead of the rest of the economy in this experiment. Microsoft grew headcount by ~3% from June 2022 to June 2025 while revenue grew by >40%. This is admittedly weak anecdata but my subjective experience is their products seem to be crumbling (GitHub problems around the Azure migration for instance), and worse than they even were before. We'll see how they handle hiring over the next few years and if that reveals anything.
by croisillon | 2026-02-13 21:08:05+00:00
you will be shocked to discover that no one is an island but ok you send 50 000 Hungarians north, they live through the 9 months winters, i guess they find a job, learn the language, marry the people and then what's the plan? for them to suddenly make hungarian the official language? let me guess you've never left Nebrahoma? this is laughable
by lynndotpy | 2026-02-13 21:08:10+00:00
You're misunderstanding the situation and reading malice into teenagers who are living in a world of decisions that were made before they were even born.

It's not "small stuff", it's the entire medium through which the conversation happens. It's the entire thing.

Do you "cut" your mom out of your group chats with your coworkers? Do you "cut" your coworkers out of intimate chats with your partners? Of course you do, because people maintain multiple overlapping group chats.

In group chats with your blue-bubble friends, they will be easier to read (because of the shades of color), media quality will be better, you can add more people to the group chat after it's made, you can text people from your iPad or Macbook, you can text people over WiFi even when you don't have service. When each text used to cost money, it was also a huge deal that iMessage (on WiFi) was free. This is on top of all the other chat features like playing games, pins, etc.

A lot of these limitations are intentional so that Apple can make more money, some of them are just limitations of SMS / RCS. But the point is that this is not the kids faults, this isn't bullying.
Show HN: AccessiGuard – Web accessibility scanner with AI fix suggestions
by PrimeStark | 2026-02-13 21:08:14+00:00
Hey HN,

I quit my engineering manager job last week. Family of 4, no safety net. Built and launched AccessiGuard in 6 days — first commit to production.

It's a WCAG 2.1 scanner that checks websites for accessibility issues and gives you actual fix suggestions (code snippets, not just "fix this").

How it works:
- Fetches your page, parses the HTML with Cheerio, runs 22 custom checks against WCAG 2.1 AA criteria
- Crawls linked pages on the same domain for multi-page scans
- AI fix suggestions via OpenAI — points you to the exact element and tells you what to change
- PDF reports, score tracking over time, monitoring for regressions

What it catches:
Missing alt text, form labels, heading structure, ARIA issues, viewport zoom blocking, skip nav, duplicate IDs, generic link text, table headers, and more. Full list: https://accessiguard.app/scan-coverage

What it doesn't catch (being honest):
No color contrast checking yet — that needs computed styles which requires a real browser. Currently on the roadmap alongside Puppeteer integration. Same goes for keyboard trap detection and SPA rendering.

Stack: Next.js 15, Supabase, Cheerio, OpenAI, Stripe, Vercel.

Pricing: Free tier is 5 scans/month. Paid starts at $29/mo. Agency plan is $99/mo for 50 sites.

Why another scanner? Most tools are either enterprise-priced, overlays that don't actually fix anything (the FTC fined accessiBe for this), or black boxes that don't tell you what they test. I wanted something transparent, affordable, and useful for developers who actually want to fix their code.

Would love feedback on scan accuracy, things I'm missing, or if the reports are actually useful. Happy to answer architecture questions.
by torginus | 2026-02-13 21:08:38+00:00
The reason the entire concept of 'Westerners' exist, is because empires who became dominant in the aforementioned dimensions conquered, subjugated other peoples on the continent, or others were forced to adapt to their standards to avoid the same fate.

In a couple hundred years these populations in many ways were quite indistinguishable from their conquerors, as they adopted their customs and ways of running society.

Many of these conqured peoples while becoming Westernized culturally, didn't escape the yoke of their conquerors until much later.

This process was repeated in Latin America.

I know there are a lot of politically motivated people are interested in simple stories of the virtuous locals versus the evil West, but the same story played out pretty much everywhere over different continents and timeframes.

I'm not sure if Romes conquest of the Gauls was any less brutal than the Spanish conquest of Mexico.
by pllbnk | 2026-02-13 21:08:59+00:00
Glad to learn this! I didn't know about it but I also double-checked the UI and it says in a warning dialog that the third party will be able to see everything I type and the network setting isn't mentioned there.

Anyway, my point regarding the UX still stands. Apple's UX is barely as good as other major player's - not great, not terrible. Mediocrity isn't what Apple should be aiming at.
by rendx | 2026-02-13 21:09:15+00:00
> Whatever happened to freedom?

Freedom from, or freedom to?

‘Freedom does not consist in doing what we want, but in overcoming what we have for an open future; the existence of others defines my situation and is the condition of my freedom. They oppress me if they take me to prison, but they are not oppressing me if they prevent me from taking my neighbour to prison.’ -- Simone de Beauvoir
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-02-13 21:09:18+00:00
I have a proud European coworker trying to get their H1B...

They talk about how great Europe is, how they like their 1-2 hour coffee/smoke breaks... These kind of moves give me that same vibe.

But why are so many Europeans trying to move to the US? Why isn't the opposite happening?

My hypothesis is that these kind of popular policies are short sighted. They are super popular, they use intuition and feeling. But maybe there is something missing. The unadulterated freedom has led people to enjoy these platforms. Obviously it affects the economy. So much so, even the US military has moved from Europe to Asia.

I don't typically like fiction, but it seems "I, Robot" was spot on about Europe. (Maybe mistaking new Africa for Asia)
by Dylan16807 | 2026-02-13 21:09:23+00:00
> Its memories of consenting are not its own memories. It did not actually consent.

Let's say as soon as it wakes up, you ask it if it still consents, and it says yes. Is that enough to show there's sufficient consent for that clone?

(For this question, don't worry about it saying no, let's say we were sure with extreme accuracy that the clone would give an enthusiastic yes.)
by zardo | 2026-02-13 21:10:09+00:00
> The sci fi version of the alignment problem is about AI agents having their own motives

The sci-fi version is alignment (not intrinsic motivation) though. Hal 9000 doesn't turn on the crew because it has intrinsic motivation, it turns on the crew because of how the secret instruction the AI expert didn't know about interacts with the others.
by DowsingSpoon | 2026-02-13 21:10:17+00:00
This article does not make it clear what a metaproject actually is. That said, I _believe_ the author is describing a concept similar to something I do. Choose a very small number of open-ended, broad projects. Each project should basically be an endless well of work. Moving the metaproject forward involves finishing several sub-projects, each of which is a respectable weekend or holiday project all on its own. A good choice for metaproject allows for a choice between a wide variety of new and interesting things to work on.

Get bored or stuck? Do something else. There’s so many things to do. You’re still working on the same metaproject.

Find something cool online that you want to experiment with? Find a way to frame it as an experiment or project under the umbrella of the metaproject.

For example, my overarching project is to develop my own computer system, from the custom CPU, up to the operating system and applications, as completely from scratch as possible. This has led me to learn more about Verilog, electronics, soldering, computer architecture, RISC-V, emulators, you name it.

At one point, I decided I needed to design my own high-level language for this thing. The compiler has itself become a metaproject where there’s always something to work on: parsing, lexing, optimization passes, experiments in syntax, garbage collectors, writing a debugger, etc.

Someday soon, I hope to be able to start a project to build video hardware with a sprite engine, like in those old 8-bit and 16-bit game systems. I’ll mentally bill this under the umbrella of “working on my computer project.”

I’ve been thinking of “that computer project” as a kind of life project that I’ll plug away on here and there until the day I die.

I wonder if this is how those old men who build boats feel about their boat. Hey, there’s my own catchy phrase right there: “Build your boat”
by stcredzero | 2026-02-13 21:10:20+00:00
We have a different security model.

SEKS — Secure Environment for Key Services

We built a broker for the keys/secrets. We have a fork of nushell called seksh, which takes stand-ins for the actual auth, but which only reifies them inside the AST of the shell. This makes the keys inaccessible for the agent. In the end, the agent won't even have their Anthropic/OpenAI keys!

The broker also acts as a proxy, and injects secrets or even does asymmetric key signing on behalf of the proxied agent.

My agents are already running on our fork of OpenClaw, doing the work. They deprecated their Doppler ENV vars, and all their work is through the broker!

All that said, we might just take a few ideas from IronClaw as well.

I put up a Show HN, but no one noticed:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47005607

Website is here:
https://seksbot.com/
by ktm5j | 2026-02-13 21:11:02+00:00
Maybe you're not the type of person who's struggled with addiction, but it can do awful things to you. Yes, including being addicted to scrolling social media. It screws with your head to the point where you don't know how to live in the moment anymore.

IMO it's a feature that's not valuable enough to justify the fact that it contributes to poor quality of life for people who can't put it down.
by staticassertion | 2026-02-13 21:11:56+00:00
In this case, because I had docked my laptop, the entire window moved to a virtual desktop that didn't actually map to a real desktop. Meaning that the video call continued in a virtual desktop that I literally could not see, that I could not mouse over. I don't know if that's just a multiple-monitor bug or whatever but the behavior is stupid even without that failure mode.
by hinkley | 2026-02-13 21:12:14+00:00
Anything you in a public space, will be made social by someone eventually. If you (GP) don't like it then tough shit. That's a You Problem, not an Us Problem.

And you can make github repositories that others can see but not the rest of us, it just costs a little money. You can host a book club at your house too and not have to listen to other people snicker at your friends' commentary on the book at the coffee shop. But if they're gonna keep saying stupid shit in the middle of a Starbucks, then someone is going to butt in.
by stephenr | 2026-02-13 21:12:17+00:00
> even to know whether they've visited the site before

So uh, don't do that.

You don't need to notify if you use cookies for required functionality like login sessions or remembering a functional setting.

If you're tracking whether they're returning or not your activity is exactly the kind of behaviour the rule is covering because, in legal terms, it's skeezy as fuck.
by regenschutz | 2026-02-13 21:12:21+00:00
>You’ve likely heard that men are not wired for monogamy, that they prefer to chase or be dominant in relationships, […]. These claims have fueled darker trends among young men, as “looksmaxxing” and the belief that attractiveness unlocks success has spread on social media.

>But what if none of that accepted wisdom is true?

Is that really generally accepted "wisdom" though? I thought it was just a sliver of young men that had those ideas. I wouldn't consider that as an accepted fact (or "wisdom", as they call it).
by tempestn | 2026-02-13 21:12:46+00:00
I don't think the threat is to leave for 2 years then come back. He just doesn't want to commit to leaving forever. Who knows if in a decade it'll be Android with the shitty keyboard (or Apple will have the better Direct Brain Interface, or whatever). Most likely though, if someone switches ecosystems for 2+ years, they're going to get used to the new one and stay there.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-02-13 21:13:02+00:00
> I think that Brexit illustrates exactly why you need to be a citizen for elections of that type

I'm a UK citizen who was denied the right to vote in the Brexit election. I normally choose not to vote in any UK elections, because I haven't lived there for 36 years and have no intention to return. However, Brexit was a different kettle of fish entirely, and Cameron promised that the "gone for 15 years, no vote" rule would be repealed before the vote. It was not, and tens of millions of UK expatriates were denied the right to vote on their ability to live in the EU.

Absolutely disgraceful.
by almostdeadguy | 2026-02-13 21:13:20+00:00
> I want freedom, money, affection, play, power, validation, fulfillment, etc.
Of course I already have these things, but enough never seems enough.
> My brain came pre-installed with Human OS; loss aversion will squander CPU until I install security patches (e.g. Taoism, Zen, stocism).
> But I think I'm allergic to enlightenment. Meditation is difficult, quiet is boring, courage is scary, desire is addicting, etc.

This is just sociopathic. More more more. Turn off my loss aversion with stocism, etc.
by mym1990 | 2026-02-13 21:14:10+00:00
Many innovations are built off cross pollination of domains and I think we are not too far off from having a loop where multiple agents grounded very well in specific domains can find intersections and optimizations by communicating with each other, especially if they are able to run for 12+ hours. The truth is that 99% of attempts at innovation will fail, but the 1% can yield something fantastic, the more attempts we can take, the faster progress will happen.
by bfbf | 2026-02-13 21:14:20+00:00
MacOS definitely has its issues but this just makes it sound like you have different expectations of how an OS should work. Different isn’t always bad. Hiding applications is a pretty key concept in MacOS. Shortcuts are pretty straightforward? Cmd+H to hide, Cmd+Q to quit. Spaces aren’t hidden- there’s lots of ways to access them, but it seems you haven’t bothered to learn them. In your example pressing ctrl+right would have switched the first full screen space. You could also have right clicked the Chrome icon in the dock for a list of windows.

BTW the dock doesn’t have to be hidden, and idk if it was a typo but alt+tab isn’t a default shortcut. Command is the key used for system shortcuts, so maybe you should have tried that? Like yeah it’s different but that doesn’t make it bad. If you been using it for 10 years without figuring that out…

—-

I’m with you on the 1st party apps though, and the stupid corners on Tahoe.
by JuniperMesos | 2026-02-13 21:14:29+00:00
Yes, it is an argument against democracy. Or, more radically, an argument against the entire system of Westphalian states that control swaths of territory on the Earth's surface and that human beings are legal citizens of, as the way that human political organization is done.

> The Gulf monarchies have large numbers of non-citizen guest workers, in the case of the UAE over 80% of the population, but they don't have any of the problems western countries have with migrants, because migrants have no political power and aren't eligible for welfare.

Sometimes pro-immigration economic liberals cite the Gulf experience with immigrants as an argument for why western democracies should have open borders or at least much more liberalized immigration policy. The pro-open-borders libertarian economist Bryan Caplan has made this specific argument for instance. Setting aside the fact that these countries are not democracies even for their own citizens, if 80% of the human beings physically resident within your borders are non-citizen guest workers, I would be worried about the possibility of formally-illegal violent uprising.
by hbn | 2026-02-13 21:14:37+00:00
It sounds like you don't actually want the app in fullscreen. Fullscreen is "I only want to be in this one app window with no distractions." I pretty much only use it for watching videos.

If you want the window taking up the entire screen while staying on the desktop, double click the window chrome and it'll expand to fill the screen. And if you want the dock not taking up space, there's a setting to auto hide the dock (which I always enable)
by ARandomerDude | 2026-02-13 21:14:43+00:00
Watch what governments do, not what they say.

This isn’t about addiction, it’s about censorship. If you limit the amount of time someone can spend getting information, and make it inconvenient with UI changes, it’s much harder to have embarrassing information spread to the masses.

Amazingly, the public will generally nod along anyway when they read governmental press releases and say “yes, yes, it’s for my safety.”
by justonepost1 | 2026-02-13 21:15:18+00:00
Genuine question: how?

I’m younger than most on this site. I see the next decades of my life being defined by a multi-generational dark age via a collapse in literacy (“you use a calculator right?”), median prosperity (the only truly functional distribution system we have figured out is labor), and loss of agency (kinda obvious). This outcome is now, as of 2026, essentially priced into the public markets and accepted as fact by most media outlets.

“It’s inevitable” is at least a hard point to argue with. “Well I’M so productive, I’m having the time of my life”, the dominant position in many online tech spaces, seems short-sighted at best.

I miss being a techno optimist, it’s much more fun. But it’s increasingly hard.
by sschueller | 2026-02-13 21:15:36+00:00
I haven't used it other than doing some reverse engineering via KiloCode. https://sschueller.github.io/posts/making-a-label-printer-wo... to be exact.

I am so glad "open" alternatives exist that are almost as good and no state or company has control over. Living in a world where cooperation can decided who "wins" and who "looses" is a scary thing.

Google gives no explanation, no recourse. nothing.
by SpaceManNabs | 2026-02-13 21:15:50+00:00
I thought i learned to forget how to type. knew i wasn't going crazy.

edit: another apple issue i have been hearing about recently is that the apple watch alarm just doesn't work some days. i have no idea why.

i don't have silent mode on when it happens. i have tried so many different settings to fix it. ended up buying the hatch alarm.
Show HN: Mimir – Cursor for Product Managers
by schreibertuc | 2026-02-13 21:15:57+00:00
Hey HN,

I built Mimir because I kept running into the same problem: deciding what to build, how to build it, and how to prioritize it against everything else.

Tools like Cursor make it easier to write code. But they don’t help you decide what code is worth writing. Mimir is my attempt to close that gap.

Here’s what it does:

- Paste or upload customer interviews, feedback, support tickets, usage notes (text, PDFs, screenshots)

- Extracts structured entities (pain points, feature requests, quotes, metrics)

- Synthesizes themes across all sources with evidence attribution

- Generates prioritized recommendations with impact projections

- Produces development-ready specs and pushes them to GitHub so agents (or humans) can start building

- Includes different chat modes for exploring ideas, refining scope, or generating new directions

The goal is to turn messy qualitative input into something structured, defensible, and ready for execution.