MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: MacMule – EMule for MacOsx
by warpz | 2026-02-16 18:15:11+00:00
I built this because I wanted to see if eMule still worked in 2025. It does — the ed2k and Kad networks are still alive.

The problem: eMule is a Win32 application. Getting it to run on macOS means Wine, and asking non-technical users to install and configure Wine is a non-starter.

The solution: macMule bundles eMule (community x64 build by irwir) with Wine Crossover (by Gcenx) into a single .app. Download, drag to /Applications, launch. It auto-connects to eMule Security servers and Kad on startup. Works on Apple Silicon through Rosetta 2.

The trade-off is size (~1 GB) since Wine is bundled. But after that it's genuinely zero-config.

Build process is a shell script — you can compile specific versions or latest stable. Requires Wine Crossover, Rosetta 2, and gh CLI.

Licensing: eMule is GPL v2, Wine is LGPL 2.1. Both respected in packaging.

Some things I found interesting while building this:

- The ed2k/Kad networks still have content you won't find on modern platforms. It's a weird corner of internet archaeology.
- Wine Crossover handles the Win32 → macOS translation surprisingly well for a client this old.
- The biggest challenge was getting auto-connection to work reliably out of the box so users wouldn't need to configure server lists manually.

Happy to answer questions about the packaging approach or Wine internals.

Reddit thread with some discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1r5dile/os_emule_f...
by clarabennett26 | 2026-02-16 18:15:22+00:00
The Cloudflare DNS challenge for certs is a nice touch — avoids exposing port 80 entirely. I set up Prosody a while back and the TURN/STUN config for voice calls was the part that tripped me up the most. coturn can be finicky with Docker networking if you're not careful about host mode vs bridged.
by danaris | 2026-02-16 18:15:29+00:00
Indeed: particularly given that—just as a nonexhaustive "for instance"—one of the fairly common things expected in AGI is that it's sapient. Meaning, essentially, that we have created a new life form, that should be given its own rights.

Now, I do not in the least believe that we have created AGI, nor that we are actually close. But you're absolutely right that we can't just handwave away the definitions. They are crucial both to what it means to have AGI, and to whether we do (or soon will) or not.
by magikMaker | 2026-02-16 18:15:58+00:00
A bit more on the sequencer: it's not meant for composing full songs, it's a scratchpad for testing chord progressions. You can adjust tempo, time signature, and note length to hear how a progression feels at different speeds and rhythms.

If you change the scale or mode, you can. update the chords (click the update button) to reflect the new diatonic chords, so you can quickly A/B the same progression in, say, Ionian vs. Mixolydian.

I have some ideas for what to add next like for instance PDF export with chords or MIDI export, but I'd rather hear what would actually be useful to you. What would make this tool part of your workflow?
by linsomniac | 2026-02-16 18:16:00+00:00
I don't need to trust you, I've done my own testing and using newer tooling features is dramatically better than not. One of the things about the AI tooling is that it's very inexpensive to run experiments (this week I've had it build a particular tool in Python, Go, Rust, and Zig, for example).

Using skills, multiple models, MCPs and agent teams is significantly improving the results I'm seeing in real world problems.

You haven't really given me any reason why I should trust you, but I'll tell you it's going to be hard for me to trust advice that contradicts my test results.
by shagie | 2026-02-16 18:16:43+00:00
> Maybe in the distant future we'll realize that the most reliable way to prompting LLMs are by using a structured language that eliminates ambiguity, it will probably be rather unnatural and take some time to learn.

On the foolishness of "natural language programming". https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...

Since the early days of automatic computing we have had people that have felt it as a shortcoming that programming required the care and accuracy that is characteristic for the use of any formal symbolism. They blamed the mechanical slave for its strict obedience with which it carried out its given instructions, even if a moment's thought would have revealed that those instructions contained an obvious mistake. "But a moment is a long time, and thought is a painful process." (A.E.Houseman). They eagerly hoped and waited for more sensible machinery that would refuse to embark on such nonsensical activities as a trivial clerical error evoked at the time.

(and it continues for some many paragraphs)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8222017 2014 - 154 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35968148 2023 - 65 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43564386 2025 - 277 comments
by twodave | 2026-02-16 18:17:35+00:00
The reason I dislike AI use in certain modes is because the end result looks like a Happy Meal toy from McDonalds. It looks roughly like the thing you wanted or expected, but on even a casual examination it falls far short. I don’t believe this is something we can overcome with better models. Or, if we can then what we will end up writing as prompts will begin to resemble a programming language. At which point it just isn’t worth what it costs.

This tech is a breakthrough for so many reasons. I’m just not worried about it replacing my job. Like, ever.
by whynotmaybe | 2026-02-16 18:17:52+00:00
I'm sure "bad quality" will soon be classified in the "cost of doing business" section like fines for not respecting laws.

That's why AI is hurting us so much right now.

We were always trying to have quality in our project, whether it was for readability or for code evolution.

No, Steve, you don't name your 42 variables with only two letter and no you don't use Norse mythology for naming servers in your infrastructure.
Yes Odin is the most powerful so it's the production server but Tyr for the source control and print server isn't really obvious.

Well now AI is Steve.

It will create nice little 300 lines functions with a block repeating 6 times. You know that you will have 6 fix to make instead of one if this block was in a simple function.

It's not instinct a this point, is pure knowledge screaming "it's wrong".

And you now realise that the hidden strength from your craft wasn't about coding the best binary tree search algorithm, it was about knowing the underlying soft unknowns that really made it software.

We have a strong feeling that we're watching dozens of kids running with scissors and we don't know whether it's really scissors, we're just getting too old for this shit, or if we should just stop "progress" because we don't like it.

We're the horse breeders when everyone discovered cars.
by Der_Einzige | 2026-02-16 18:18:29+00:00
Pangram is crap. Simple N-gram analysis ala stylometry techniques your local 3 letter has known about since the 90s are more effective.

Also, I can make even the most slopped models give me 100% "human written" easily by simply fiddling with the sampler settings. Catch me if you can with temp = 100 and a modern distributional aware truncation sampler (i.e. P-less decoding, top-H, even min_p)
by HillRat | 2026-02-16 18:18:46+00:00
That's a model that works with SpaceX, which holds a unique grip on American orbital launch capability and capacity; less so for Anduril, which has been rather unsuccessful so far in its big-ticket drone-warfare efforts but has, to its credit, diversified key defense manufacturing areas by jumping into, e.g., SRMs; and possibly not at all for Palantir, which doesn't do anything a copy of Neo4J doesn't. And there's a real question regarding their ability to continue, post-DJT, holding security clearances given their personal lives and behaviors, their contacts with foreign officials, and whether they had derogatory information on other clearance holders that they did not bring forward.
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-16 18:19:29+00:00
Tapes are great for true cold storage (will easily last many decades!) but they will wear out significantly with more intense use: you only get a couple hundred passes total over their full data capacity, either read or write. In practice, you still need plenty of big hard disks to act as nearline storage for practical use, and the tape only rarely does storage and retrieval in bulk. This is also why you see mechanical tape libraries with tens or hundreds of tapes for a single read/write unit: you don't really need more than that.
by reactordev | 2026-02-16 18:19:44+00:00
You are correct which is why I recently built such a tool. Well, an evidence management tool.

The premise here is, during an investigation, a suspect might have priors, might have digital evidence, might have edge connections to the case. Use the platform and AI to find them, if they exist.

What it doesn’t do: “Check this video and see if this person is breaking the law”.

What it does do: “Analyze this persons photos and track their movements, see if they intersect with Suspect B, or if suspect B shows up in any photos or video.”

It does a lot more than that but you get the idea…

The interpretation of the law is up to the courts. The enforcement of it is up to the executive. The concept of the law is up to Congress. That’s how this is supposed to work.
by mullingitover | 2026-02-16 18:19:51+00:00
AI is scary, but look on the bright side:

Whenever there is a massive paradigm shift in technology like we have with AI today, there are absolutely massive, devastating wars because the existing strategic stalemates are broken. Industrialized precision manufacturing? Now we have to figure out who can make the most rifles and machine guns. Industrialized manufacturing of high explosives? Time to have a whole world war about it. Industrialized manufacturing of electronics? Time for another world war.

Industrialized manufacturing of intelligence will certainly lead to a global scale conflict to see if anyone can win formerly unwinnable fights.

Thus the concerns about whether you have a job or not will, in hindsight, seem trivial as we transition to fighting for our very survival.
by charcircuit | 2026-02-16 18:20:03+00:00
>How much time will someone realistically dedicate to this if they need to have a separate day job?

Typically parents subsidize the living of their children while they are still learning.

>Most of the technology I’ve had access to isn’t something a solo hobbyist dev will ever touch

That's already true today. Most developers are react developers. If hired for something else they will have to pick that up on the job. When you have niche tech stacks you already will need to compromise on the kind of experience people have. With AI having exact experience in the technology is not that necessary since AI can handle most of it.
by FireBeyond | 2026-02-16 18:20:49+00:00
> and would bother with the suspicious guy high on fent looking into kids bedroom reports seriously

Wuh? I was a paramedic who probably has responded to nearly 1,000 fentanyl abuse patients.

I've never seen one who is all busy-beavering looking for homes to surreptitiously spy in kids bedrooms.

Symptoms of fentanyl use include: extreme drowsiness, poor responsiveness, nodding off, profound confusion and inability to focus on even simple acts, delayed reactions, poor body control.

The idea of a bunch of fent users sneaking around neighborhoods trying to be pedophiliac perverts seems far more right-wing fearmongering than anything based in reality.
by shagie | 2026-02-16 18:21:14+00:00
How about...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil

> Ithkuil is an experimental constructed language created by John Quijada. It is designed to express more profound levels of human cognition briefly yet overtly and clearly, particularly about human categorization. It is a cross between an a priori philosophical and a logical language. It tries to minimize the vagueness and semantic ambiguity in natural human languages. Ithkuil is notable for its grammatical complexity and extensive phoneme inventory, the latter being simplified in an upcoming redesign.

> ...

> Meaningful phrases or sentences can usually be expressed in Ithkuil with fewer linguistic units than natural languages. For example, the two-word Ithkuil sentence "Tram-mļöi hhâsmařpţuktôx" can be translated into English as "On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point."

Half as Interesting - How the World's Most Complicated Language Works https://youtu.be/x_x_PQ85_0k (length 6:28)
by Nevermark | 2026-02-16 18:21:20+00:00
I am talking about getting support for regulations or even law that constrain damage.

Maybe you didn’t read what I wrote? Thats not more market “freedom”.

To make big changes, good changes, you do need both widespread grassroots support, and the cooperation and competencies of big players.

The military has labeled climate change a global destabilizer for years. Insurance companies and farmers are dealing with the fallout already.

Despite growing corruption, there are still competent people in these organizations to work with.

Neither surrender by blanket cynicism, or the incompetence of apathy, are going to solve anything.
by brabel | 2026-02-16 18:21:58+00:00
Can confirm. We don’t know if AI really is about to make programmers who write code by hand obsolete, but we sure as hell fear our competitors will ship features 10x faster than us. What is the logical next step?? Invest lots of money on AI or keep hoping it’s a fad and risk being left in the dust, even if you think that risk is fairly small?
by JeremyNT | 2026-02-16 18:22:07+00:00
I think this is basically the only SWE-type job that exists beyond the (relatively near) future: finding the right spec and feeding it to the bots. And in this way I think even complete laypeople will be able to create software using the bots, but you'd still want somebody with a deeper understanding in this role for serious projects.

The bots even now can really help you identify technical problems / mistakes / gaps / bad assumptions, but there's no replacing "I know what the business wants/needs, and I know what makes my product manager happy, and I know what 'feels' good" type stuff.
by empressplay | 2026-02-16 18:22:22+00:00
It's worse than that. It's ultimately a military technology. The end-game here is to use it offensively and / or defensively against other countries. Whoever establishes dominance first wins. And so you have to push adoption, so that it gets tested and can be iterated. But this isn't about making money (they are losing it like crazy!) This is end-of-the world shit and about whoever will be left standing once all the dominoes fall -- if they ever fall (let's hope they don't!)

But it's tacitly understood we need to develop this as soon as we can, as fast as we can, before those other guys do. It's a literal arms race.
by writeslowly | 2026-02-16 18:22:32+00:00
The vibes around the self-driving car hype (maybe 10 years ago?) felt very similar to me, but on a smaller scale. There was a lot of "You might like driving your car and having a steering wheel, but if you do, you're a luddite who will soon be forced to ride about in our featureless rented robot pods" type of statements, or that one AI scientist who was quoted saying we should just change laws around how humans are allowed to interact with streets to protect the self-driving cars.

Not all of it was like that, I think oddly enough it was Tesla or just Elon Musk claimng you'd soon be able to take a nap in your car on your morning commute through some sort of Jetsons tube or that you could let your car earn money on the side while you weren't using it, which might actually be appealing to the average person. But a lot of it felt like self-driving car companies wanted you to feel like they just wanted to disrupt your life and take your things away.
by bpodgursky | 2026-02-16 18:23:03+00:00
You guys can hate him, but Alex Karp of Palantir had the most honest take on this recently which was basically:

"Yes, I would love to pause AI development, but unless we get China to do the same, we're f***, and there's no advantage unilaterally disarming" (not exact, but basically this)

You can assume bad faith on the parts of all actors, but a lot of people in AI feel similarly.
by lambdasquirrel | 2026-02-16 18:23:30+00:00
Yup, if you haven’t heard first-hand (i.e. from the source) at least one story where some exec was at least using AI to intimidate his employees, or outright terminating them in some triumphant way (whether or not this was a sound business decision), then you’ve gotta be living in a bubble. AI might not be the problem but the way it’s being used is.
by zarzavat | 2026-02-16 18:23:47+00:00
If a human learns to code by reading other people's code, and then writes their own new code, should they have to attribute all the code they ever read?

Plagiarism is a concept from academia because in academia you rise through the ranks by publishing papers and getting citations. Using someone else's work but not citing them breaks that system.

The real world doesn't work like that: your value to the world is how much you improve it. It would not help the world if everyone were forced to account for all the shoulders they have stood on like academics do. Rather, it's sufficient to merely attribute your most substantial influences and leave it at that.
by astrobe_ | 2026-02-16 18:23:49+00:00
It sounds like OKAD [1].

In my very modest experience, I once wrote a system that I could boot from a floppy, edit, then recompile. For this I needed to make an assembler, or rather I was willing to meet the challenge of writing an assembler for the 8086, which was notoriously difficult (not really for the subset I needed, which did not include the complex addressing modes for one thing).

When it came to writing the changes on the floppy I was very scared to trash my hard disk (writing to HD or floppy was just a value in a register when you use the BIOS API), but fortunately I found an old Toshiba laptop that had an external power-on switch for the hard disk! That thing was running at 10 Mhz in "turbo" mode!

Bottom line: I spent a lot of times reading the ISA specs, write the assembler in Forth, and compare/check its output with an actual assembler. It would have been more efficient to enter directly the instructions in hex, I think, except maybe for the boot sector.

[1] https://www.ultratechnology.com/okad.htm
by steveklabnik | 2026-02-16 18:23:55+00:00
Recently, Claude gives you these options when asking you to accept a plan:

Would you like to proceed?

> 1. Yes, clear context and auto-accept edits (shift+tab)
2. Yes, auto-accept edits
3. Yes, manually approve edits
4. Type here to tell Claude what to change

So the default is to do it in a new context.

If you examine what this actually does, it clears the context, and then says "here's the plan", points to the plan file, and also points to the logs of the previous discussion so that if it determines it should go back and look at them, it can.
by politelemon | 2026-02-16 18:24:27+00:00
This GitHub readme was helpful in understanding their motivation, cheers for sharing it.

> Integrating agents into it prevents fragmentation of their service and allows them to keep ownership of their interface, branding and connection with their users

Looking at the contrived examples given, I just don't see how they're achieving this. In fact it looks like creating MCP specific tools will achieve exactly the opposite. There will immediately be two ways to accomplish a thing and this will result in a drift over time as developers need to take into account two ways of interacting with a component on screen. There should be no difference, but there will be.

Having the LLM interpret and understand a page context would be much more in line with assistive technologies. It would require site owners to provide a more useful interface for people in need of assistance.
by BenedictPorkins | 2026-02-16 18:24:31+00:00
I built this because every time I asked Claude to help me interact with a website, it would rediscover the same
things from scratch — is this a React SPA? Does it have an API? Which selectors work?

Foxhole is a Firefox sidebar extension where Claude learns and remembers how each site works across sessions.
It saves site profiles (UI-only vs API-driven), working selectors, endpoints, and workflows. Next visit, it
reads those specs before doing anything.

Key things it does differently:

- Site profiles: knows whether to click buttons or call APIs
- Spec staleness: flags old knowledge, Claude can delete broken specs
- Not QA automation: asks the user to handle age gates, logins, CAPTCHAs instead of flailing
- Prompt injection defense: sanitizes page content before Claude sees it
- Context compression: strips screenshots and raw payloads from old turns, keeps semantic summaries

Firefox-only (Manifest V2), no build step, raw JS. Uses your own Anthropic API key.
by dmm | 2026-02-16 18:24:36+00:00
> The classical cultural example is the Luddites, a social movement that failed so utterly

Maybe not the best example? The luddites were skilled weavers that had their livelihoods destroyed by automation. The govt deployed 12,000 troops against the luddites, executed dozens after show trials, and made machine breaking a capital offense.

Is that what you have planned for me?
by zug_zug | 2026-02-16 18:24:57+00:00
Part of what's going on here -- why we have this gap in what we say we fear and how we act, is just a human deficiency.

I remember when Covid got out of control in China a lot of people around me [in NY] had this energy of "so what it'll never come to us." I'm not saying that they believed that, or had some rational opinion, but they had an emotional energy of "It's not big deal." The emotional response can be much slower than the intellectual response, even if that fuse is already lit and the eventuality is indisputable.

Some people are good at not having that disconnect. They see the internet in 1980 and they know that someday 60 years from now it'll be the majority of shopping, even though 95% of people they talk to don't know what it is and laugh about it.

AI is a little-bit in that stage... It's true that most people know what it is, but our emotional response has not caught up to the reality of all of the implications of thinking machines that are gaining 5+ iq points per year.

We should be starting to write the laws now.
by bhawks | 2026-02-16 18:25:12+00:00
The actions of the government should always be publicly observable. This is what keeps it accountable. The fear that a person might be unfairly treated due to a long past indiscretion does not outweigh the public's right to observe and hold the government to account.

Alternatively consider that you are assuming the worst behavior of the public and the best behavior of the government if you support this and it should be obvious the dangerous position this creates.
by SoftTalker | 2026-02-16 18:25:16+00:00
And yet people can still make money producing and selling high quality physical products. It's a smaller market but there are people who don't want mass produced chinese crap and they go out of their way to find it.

There will be people who will pay for "human coded" software if it is better. Quality is always a differentiator that some people will pay for.