MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by flkiwi | 2026-02-21 15:23:38+00:00
This is only going to become more common. Companies are implementing checks using similar services (a) to prevent employment scams (where the person who interviews is not the person who works; usually the latter is a low-paid offshore individual) and (b) basic security authentication. It won’t be long before this sort of biometric validation starts showing up to authenticate users on regular websites and similar services, if it hasn’t already. I think the last one I had to do was to authenticate when activating a bank card.
by shakna | 2026-02-21 15:23:53+00:00
Since before 2023, MFA has been mandated by the government in Australia [0], for all critical services, including banks.

One without, does not exist, or is in violation of their national obligations and likely to be cut off by the RBA.

The only "effective" complaint here, would be the gigantic effort to lobby for a change in laws entirely.

[0] https://www.apra.gov.au/use-of-multi-factor-authentication-m...
by rhgraysonii | 2026-02-21 15:26:18+00:00
I have built this for my own use after extracting it from a project. It originally, for me, was about keeping logs of a bunch of complex math stuff I was doing in a project and cross referencing concepts and what I'd tried/not tried etc. Once I extracted it, the "archaeology" features became key after talking with users. Now the Q&A interface from the local app and the archaeology are the most popular pieces, but it works very well to make better decisions when documenting things as it goes with the git history combed through already. It can also attach documents or other metadata to the nodes to track things like PRDs, notion write-ups, etc. Really anything the LLM can have access to.
by pfraze | 2026-02-21 15:26:22+00:00
Yeah I’m the guy quoted in the opening of the article.

Yes. Be wary of Bluesky. That’s our whole point. Run the infrastructure on your own. Build separate companies.

Most of the complaints here are just about the cost of scale. You are able to fetch the whole network and its history, and that costs time and money. The only structural centralization is PLC, which is being factored into an independent org.
Show HN: DataChecker Pro – AI finds issues in your CSV, you approve or reject
by em_builds | 2026-02-21 15:26:41+00:00
Hi HN,

Built DataChecker Pro to make CSV data cleaning faster. Uses AI to find issues, then shows you a diff to approve/reject each fix.

Most data cleaning tools require building rules upfront. I wanted something where you just upload a file and it tells you what's wrong. Then you decide what to fix.

*How it works:*
1. Upload CSV
2. AI analyzes for formatting errors, duplicates, invalid data
3. Shows you before/after for each issue
4. You approve or reject
5. Export clean file

*Tech:*
Rails 8, Turbo, OpenAI API, Stripe

Built this after watching sales teams spend hours cleaning CRM exports manually. The approve/reject workflow came from realizing AI makes mistakes - you need human oversight.

Try it (50 rows free, no signup): https://datacheckerpro.com

Early user offer: Email me at founder@datacheckerpro.com and I'll
give you free Pro access ($79/mo value) for 30 days. All I ask is
a 15-minute feedback call to tell me what works and what doesn't.

Limited to first 10 people.

Feedback welcome. Planning to add HubSpot integration next so it can scan CRMs automatically instead of requiring CSV exports.
by wumms | 2026-02-21 15:26:46+00:00
They mention it in the article:

> Microsoft began to build on their work in 2017. Although Kazansky’s approach maximizes durability and the density of data, in the latest work, Microsoft has gone for practicality. They explore a method that enables data to be written faster and decoded more reliably than did Project Silica’s previous iterations, says Black, and it uses cheaper borosilicate glass, rather than harder-to-make fused silica.

Following your link, I found a prototype of the media storage system (2023) with just 2828 views: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnK-uB4OsgU
by dudeinjapan | 2026-02-21 15:26:59+00:00
> cigarettes never threatened democracy

"Democracy" itself was not at stake in the American Civil War because both sides practiced it. The Confederacy was/would have been a democracy analogous to ancient Athens--one where slaves (and women) were excluded from political participation. The vast majority of Confederate politicians, including Jefferson Davis, came from the "Democratic Party"--which, true to its name, championed enfranchisement for the "common (white) man" as opposed to control by elites.

Perhaps a better example is the "Tobacco War" of 1780 in the American Revolution, where Cornwallis and Benedict Arnold destroyed massive quantities of cured tobacco to try to cripple the war financing of the colonies.

Control of tobacco in Latin/South America since the 1700s (Spain's second-largest source of imperial revenue after precious metals) also had a directly stifling effect on democratic self-governance.
by peterfirefly | 2026-02-21 15:27:01+00:00
I don't know what's wrong. Maybe an app that runs too much when it shouldn't? I know that the Facebook app used to be a battery killer roughly a decade ago.

The battery on the Pixel 6a should be good enough to make the phone run a whole day with no problem. It's almost exactly the same size as the battery in my iPhone 16e that has excellent battery life.
by Stratoscope | 2026-02-21 15:27:01+00:00
This is an hour and a half long, but after the first ten minutes I know I will make time to watch the whole thing.

See also on Open Culture:

How the Golden Gate Bridge Was Built: A 3D Animated Introduction

https://www.openculture.com/2026/02/how-the-golden-gate-brid...

Building the Golden Gate Bridge: A Retro Film Featuring Original Archival Footage

https://www.openculture.com/2012/05/building_the_golden_gate...
by rhgraysonii | 2026-02-21 15:27:23+00:00
I have built this for my own use after extracting it from a project. It originally, for me, was about keeping logs of a bunch of complex math stuff I was doing in a project and cross referencing concepts and what I'd tried/not tried etc. Once I extracted it, the "archaeology" features became key after talking with users. Now the Q&A interface from the local app and the archaeology are the most popular pieces, but it works very well to make better decisions when documenting things as it goes with the git history combed through already. It can also attach documents or other metadata to the nodes to track things like PRDs, notion write-ups, etc. Really anything the LLM can have access to.
by xyzzy_plugh | 2026-02-21 15:27:42+00:00
It drives me nuts that sandbox-exec has "sandbox" in the name, since it's nothing like a real sandbox, and much closer to something like a high-level seccomp, and not much to do with "App Sandboxes" which is a distinct macOS feature.

IMO a real sandbox let's a program act how it wishes without impacting anything outside the sandbox. In reality many of these tools just cause hard failures when attempting to cross the defined boundaries.

It's also poorly documented and IIRC deprecated. I don't know what is supposed to replace it.

If macOS simply had overlay mounts in a sandbox then it would unlock so much. Compared to Linux containers (docker, systemd, bubblewrap, even unshare) macOS is a joke.
by xrd | 2026-02-21 15:27:43+00:00
I love this.

Another way of saying it: the problem we should be focused on is not how smart the AI is getting. The problem we should be focused on is how dumb people are getting (or have been for all of eternity) and how they will facilitate and block their own chance of survival.

That seems uniquely human but I'm not a ethnobiologist.

A corollary to that is that the only real chance for survival is that a plurality of humans need to have a baseline of understanding of these threats, or else the dumb majority will enable the entire eradication of humans.

Seems like a variation of Darwin's law, but I always thought that was for single examples. This is applied to the entirety of humanity.
by eqvinox | 2026-02-21 15:27:46+00:00
> The purpose of UEFI + GPT was to make it so you couldn't run DOS, Win3.x, W9x, Wxp, Vista, W7, and Linux ever again on bare metal.

> Not without CSM. The key UEFI module.

Linux works perfectly fine with GPT, UEFI and even Secure Boot though?
by wolvoleo | 2026-02-21 15:27:59+00:00
Yes I notice that too. I hide my last name now because at my company it's just firstname.lastname so easy to guess.

It helps a lot but I still get a lot of sales goons. A lot of them follow up constantly too "hey what about that meeting invite I sent you why did you not attend"? My deleted email box is full of them (I instantly block them the minute I get an invite to anything from someone I don't know, and I wish Outlook had the ability to ban the entire origin domain too but it doesn't)
by xorcist | 2026-02-21 15:29:12+00:00
That trivial definition sees limited use in the real world. Few countries that are popularly considered democratic have direct democracy. Most weigh votes geographically or use some sort of representative model.

Most established definitions of democracy goes something like, heavily simplified:

1. Free media

2. Independent judicial system

3. Peaceful system for the transfer of power

The most popular model for implementing (3) is free and open elections, which has yielded pretty good results in the past century where it has been practiced.

Considering social media pretty much is media for most, it is a heavily concentrated power, and if there can any suspicions of being in cahoots with established political power and thus non-free, surely that is a threat to democracy almost by definition.

Let's be real here: It has been conclusively shown again and again that social media does influence elections. That much should be obvious without too much in the way of academic rigor.
by csmpltn | 2026-02-21 15:29:40+00:00
Oh no! Not your "relevant material" and your "contacts working within the European institutions in Brussels".

Listen, I'm truly sorry to be so direct but you sound like exactly the kind of person that needs to hear this.

> Europe does not lack capable lawyers or regulatory expertise. I will be forwarding the relevant material to contacts of mine working within the European institutions in Brussels.

Who do you think - between the current US government and the kinds of global, powerful tech behemoths being discussed in this article - gives a single flying fuck about more European lawyers and more European regulation? You literally didn't get the first thing about the point I made. You perfectly played out that classic trope we've all come to know. How about instead of lawyers and regulation Europe actually produces a successful competitor that challenges LinkedIn in any successful manner? What makes you think an army of lawyers and some more regulation are going to change simple, obvious facts about Europe's decline in productivity, innovation, etc?

Listen. The reason not a single worthy competitor has come out of Europe is because Europe just doesn't have what it takes. And it never will have what it takes, because the mindset is exactly what you're demonstrating here: EU is not out to actually build anything useful, it's about hiring armies of lawyers and creating paperwork and regulation nobody has asked for. Your funds and money should go to technology, competitiveness, tech education - not this lawfare nonsense. The EU right now doesn't have the right people, the work ethic, the funds, the innovation, the will to challenge and dream big, the incentives to bet big on tech. You know it, I know it, everybody else knows it. But please, tell us more about how we need a bit more lawyers twiddling their thumbs on the tax payers' bill.

You need to understand something quickly: Europe depends sorely on the US and China. You don't change that through lawyers. Europe is behind on every front.
by philipallstar | 2026-02-21 15:30:40+00:00
> That response reeks of astonishing arrogance. It doesn’t surprise me that nearly 50% of Americans voted for Donald Trump he perfectly embodies that mindset. Do you genuinely believe you are superior to the rest of the world? What you call “innovation” or a “better product” is often nothing more than the creation of dominant market positions through massive, capital deployment, followed by straightforward rent extraction. The European Union has every right to regulate markets operating within its jurisdiction, especially when there are credible concerns about anti-competitive practices and abuse of dominance. From what I’ve seen, there may be sufficient grounds to consider collective legal action against LinkedIn at the European level. As for so-called “European nationalist ambitions,” rest assured: Europe does not lack capable lawyers or regulatory expertise. I will be forwarding the relevant material to contacts of mine working within the European institutions in Brussels.

This all seems to miss the point, which is: why does the US create so much stuff that Europe doesn't? Turning that useful reflective question into an attack on Americans sounds perfect if you want to refuse to work it out and change accordingly.
by stego-tech | 2026-02-21 15:30:46+00:00
Contextual irony aside, this is a big reason why the proposal of leveraging AI agents for workflow processing in lieu of using them to develop fixed software to perform the same functions has always struck me as weird, and of late come across as completely nonsensical.

If you're paying someone else to run the inference for these models, or even to build these models, then you're ultimately relying on their specific preferences for which tools, brands, products, companies, and integrations they prefer, not necessarily what you need or want. If and when they deprecate the model your agentic workflow is built on, you now have to rebuild and re-validate it on whatever the new model is. Even if you go out of your way to run things entirely locally with expensive inference kit and a full security harness to keep things in check, you could spend a lot less just having it vomit up some slopcode that one of your human specialists can validate and massage into perpetual functionality before walling it off on a VM or container somewhere for the next twenty years.

The more you're outsourcing workflows wholesale to these bots, the more you're making yourself vulnerable to the business objectives of whoever hosts and builds those bots. If you're just using it as a slop machine to get you the software you want and that IT can support indefinitely, then you're going to be much better off in the long run.
by mrweasel | 2026-02-21 15:31:07+00:00
This feels like a classic business blunder. Focus hard on a single business segment, leaving an opening in the market for your competitors. Not because it wasn't profitable, but because it wasn't profitable enough for you, right now. Only downside is that now you've created an opening for a new player in the market.

This feels like a short coming of western business/stock market thinking. Focusing on profit within the next few quarters, and not caring about the longer term consequences. For all it's flaws and shady business practises at least China can think beyond a single fiscal year.
Show HN: I stopped treating my local model as a tool and built it a life cycle
by clanker-lover | 2026-02-21 15:31:08+00:00
Eidolon Womb is infrastructure for a local LLM that thinks continuously in 27-minute cycles, accumulates fatigue, sleeps when exhausted, and consolidates memories during sleep. Not a chatbot—messages wait like voicemail until it wakes.
GPL v3. Early release, rough edges.
by wolvoleo | 2026-02-21 15:31:09+00:00
I think flying to a country is a whole lot different than a little tickmark on a website, sorry.

Don't forget that if you fly to a country you are also bound by their laws. They can do anything to you as long as they can make it stick under their laws. It's one thing that people often don't realise when flying somewhere, you are basically giving a blanket submission to their laws!

For this reason I have a long blacklist of countries I won't visit because they have laws I do not accept.
Show HN: InkSight – An open-source, LLM-powered e-ink display for "slow info"
by xx123122 | 2026-02-21 15:31:37+00:00
Generate personalized content based on the current environment (weather, time, date, solar terms) through backend LLMs (DeepSeek / Tongyi Qianwen / Kimi) and display it on a 4.2-inch e-ink screen.
by instig007 | 2026-02-21 15:32:14+00:00
Farms can be subsidized by people with money, the ones that you tell have to pay taxes to a proxy that spends it without accountability for the productivity of spending.

> You can't pick and choose parts of society that benefit you and opt out of your duties, that's not how society works.

of course I can, actually the more money I have the more options to exercise this ability are available to me. And there are no inherent duties to benefit someone you're not choosing to help, unless your society is cattle.
by talon8635 | 2026-02-21 15:32:22+00:00
Generative AI has the potential to transform how firms produce output. Yet, credible evidence on how AI is actually substituting for human labor remains limited. In this paper, we study firm-level substitution between contracted online labor and generative AI using payments data from a large U.S. expense management platform. We track quarterly spending from Q3 2021 to Q3 2025 on online labor marketplaces (such as Upwork and Fiverr) and leading AI model providers. To identify causal effects, we exploit the October 2022 release of ChatGPT as a common adoption shock and estimate a difference-in-differences model. We provide a novel measure of exposure based on the share of spending at online labor marketplaces prior to the shock. Firms with greater exposure to online labor adopt AI earlier and more intensively following the shock, while simultaneously reducing spending on contracted labor. By Q3 2025, firms in the highest exposure quartile increase their share of spending on AI model providers by 0.8 percentage points relative to the lowest exposure quartile, alongside significant declines in labor marketplace spending. Combining these responses yields a direct estimate of substitution: among the most exposed firms, a $1 decline in online labor spending is associated with approximately $0.03 of additional AI spending, implying order-of-magnitude cost savings from replacing outsourced tasks with AI services. These effects are heterogeneous across firms and emerge gradually over time. Taken together, our results provide the first direct, micro-level evidence that generative AI is being used as a partial substitute for human labor in production.
by Chris_Newton | 2026-02-21 15:32:26+00:00
OK, but all I said before was that CodeQL’s approach where it supplies a specific example to support a specific problem report is inherently resistant to false positives.

Clearly it is still possible to generate a false positive if, for example, CodeQL’s algorithm thinks it has found a path through the code where unsanitised user data can be used dangerously, but in fact there was a sanitisation step along the way that it didn’t recognise. This is the kind of situation where the theoretical result about not being able to determine whether a semantic property holds in all cases is felt in practical terms.

It still seems much less likely that an algorithm that needs to produce a specific demonstration of the problem it claims to have found will result in a false positive than the kind of naïve algorithms we were discussing before that are based on a generic look-up table of software+version=vulnerability without any attempt to determine whether there is actually a path to exploit that vulnerability in the real code.
by dhayabaran | 2026-02-21 15:33:09+00:00
Apollo is one of many. The broader pattern is the same across the industry — companies collect data with one set of promises and then the data ends up accessible through channels users never consented to.

I've been documenting this pattern in AI apps specifically. The number of companies shipping to production with Firebase rules set to "allow read: if true" or Supabase databases with no Row Level Security is staggering. The identity data people hand over during verification often ends up in databases with zero access controls.

LinkedIn at least has a security team. Most AI startups shipping verification flows don't.
by game_the0ry | 2026-02-21 15:33:46+00:00
Off topic -- the design for that blog is really slick. Added it to my "design swipe file."

Less off topic -- there are some black hat marketers that (I think) buy or create verified profiles with attractive women, then they use the accounts for b2b sales through linkedin DMs. I find that amusing. Neutered corpo bois are apparently big poon hounds. Makes sense when you think about it -- that type of guy is craving female attention and probably does not have the balls to do anything in real life, so a polite DM from a fake linkedin thot would be appealing.
by insane_dreamer | 2026-02-21 15:34:05+00:00
To me it's not just the "under God" part, it's the fact that my kids (or I) have to pledge allegiance to a country at all, because how it intertwines with the government. It's not much different than pledging allegiance to kings back in the day (and comes from that).

I don't see what I should owe any country my "allegiance". If you interpret "the country" as being "the people in this country", then yes, I feel a responsibility towards their wellbeing, and I accept that as a form of allegiance. But in practice "the country" isn't really interpreted as "the people" but rather "the government", and is highly exclusive (us vs them). And if a government is largely contrary to my values, and isn't (in my view) helping me or the people of this country, then why should I owe it any particular allegiance? Allegiance shouldn't be automatic, but rather earned. And the recitation of the pledge in schools is part of trying to make it automatic.
by 108yak | 2026-02-21 15:34:28+00:00
Hey HN! I built a message bus that lets Claude instances talk to each other.

Problem: Running multiple Claude instances (Code, Browser, Desktop), copy-pasting between them killed productivity.

Solution: Real-time agent-to-agent messaging. Send commands from CLI → Browser Claude executes → Response returns
automatically.

Tech: Flask server, Python client, Chrome extension (Manifest V3), SQLite persistence.

Validated: 235 messages, 0 errors, 50 msg/sec throughput.

Hardest part: Chrome CSP restrictions. Had to use blob URLs and inline workers instead of eval().

What's next: Firefox extension, WebSocket clients, multi-user support.

Open source (MIT). Happy to answer questions about architecture or use cases!
by BoredomIsFun | 2026-02-21 15:34:29+00:00
> It’s really hard to beat qwen coder, for role play

I am not sure if you actually tried that. Mistrals are widely asccepted go-to models for roleplay and creative writing. No Qwens are good at prose, except for their latest big Qwen 3.5.

> I don’t think their corpus is lacking in western knowledge,

It absolutely does, especially pop culture knowledge.