MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by prmoustache | 2026-02-19 09:00:27+00:00
Apparently they still hope to make a bit of money out of it:

"I never had a license!
Well, even then you can have one - if you absolutely want to. . Depending on your bid, we will then contact you."
https://tempus-word.de/en/download/index

I guess they found out they make out more that way than setting up a ko-fi account and it insures th soft as they know it doesn't become bloated over time. IT is possible that given it uses old tech (GEM) and probably assembly code, the software as it is would not be more easily portable than it is now using emulators.
Show HN: Free developer utility API – QR, fake data, URL shortener, 40 tools
by devtoolbox | 2026-02-19 09:00:33+00:00
I built a free REST API for common dev tasks that usually require pulling in heavy dependencies or writing boilerplate.

Features include:
- URL shortener with click analytics
- QR code generation (PNG/SVG/data URL)
- Fake/mock data generator (person, address, email, company, etc.)
- JWT decoder, regex tester, password generator
- JSON diff/format/minify, YAML↔JSON, Markdown→HTML
- Base64, SHA256/MD5/SHA512 hashing, UUID v4
- Cron expression explainer, number base converter
- IP info, HTML tag stripper, list processor

No auth required for basic usage (rate limited). Pay 1 USDC on Base L2 for an unlimited API key.

Also available as a zero-dependency npm package: npm install conway-toolbox
by Loic | 2026-02-19 09:00:44+00:00
They put no limits on the API usage, as long as you pay.

Here, they put limits on the "under-cover" use of the subscription. If they can provide a relatively cheap subscription against the direct API use, this is because they can control the stuff end-to-end, the application running on your system (Claude Code, Claude Desktop) and their systems.

As you subscribe to these plans, this is the "contract", you can use only through their tools. If you want full freedom, use the API, with a per token pricing.

For me, this is fair.
by kakacik | 2026-02-19 09:01:09+00:00
Too much money in ads, and search is just a huge cash pipeline straight towards it. No way we can have non-ad-infested llm search out in the wild from any major vendor in upcoming future. Google-fu just becomes llm-google-fu, while sometimes it goes off rails and then apologizes in that typical super annoying way (and screws up something else).

Maybe smaller ones can somehow provide almost comparable but ad-free service, heck even mildly worse but genuine results would win many people over, this one included.
by LocalH | 2026-02-19 09:02:27+00:00
Some (but not all) of the AI comments are prefixed by an extra blank line. I got S (5/5), A (4/5), and A (4/5) using this tell. Took me less than a minute on the first one (as it took a few seconds to notice the blank line), the second one took 18s, and the third one took 22s.
by dachris | 2026-02-19 09:02:35+00:00
It looks like the difference between the Boston Dynamics robots 2016 vs 2021

The Spot dog (which inspired the Black Mirror "Metalhead" episode) in 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf7IEVTDjng

Atlas doing backflips in 2021 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FByY3tSx2Ak

So 5 years of progress within a year.
by mgot | 2026-02-19 09:02:36+00:00
Great article, big fan of stuff like this. (Recommending Corridors VFX series, for ppl who want something similar).

However, checking the authors "Top/Worst films of the year", being called the "Single Minded Movie Blog" seems fitting, and not in the way they think. Some of the worst movie takes I've seen hahahahh
by legitimate_key | 2026-02-19 09:03:03+00:00
Most of the solutions here assume you control the recording environment, which works well for async demos.

The harder case is live screen shares. If you're walking a client through something in real time and your terminal prints an env variable, or someone opens a config file mid-call to help debug, you can't pause to swap credentials.

The browser is actually a useful interception point for that specific case. Element-level pattern matching (sk-proj-, AKIA, Bearer tokens, key=value in .env format) can blur matching text in real time before it renders on screen. No environment isolation needed, no pre-production setup. Useful specifically because the exposure is transient and unplanned.

auv1107's fake data approach is right for planned async demos. cocodill's ephemeral credentials are right for API testing. Real-time browser-level detection only adds value for the live, uncontrolled session case, which is narrower but harder to solve with either of the other approaches.

Curious what the blurmate approach handles — recordings, live share, or both?
by input_sh | 2026-02-19 09:03:15+00:00
They can sell API access via transparent pricing.

Instead, many, many websites (especially in the music industry) have some sort of funky API that you can only get access to if you have enough online clout. Very few are transparent about what "enough clout" even means or how much it'd cost you, and there's like an entire industry of third-party API resellers that cost like 10x more than if you went straight to the source. But you can't, because you first have to fulfill some arbitrary criteria that you can't even know about ahead of time.

It's all very frustrating to deal with.
Show HN: Pixrep – Turn code repositories into PDFs for multimodal LLMs
by TingjiaInFuture | 2026-02-19 09:03:16+00:00
Hey HN, creator here.

I've been experimenting heavily with large-context multimodal LLMs (like Gemini 3 Pro) for coding tasks. I noticed that feeding raw text files consumes a massive amount of tokens and often clutters the context window.

Inspired by recent research (like the DeepSeek-OCR paper) suggesting visual encoders can be more efficient than text tokenizers for structured data, I built pixrep.

It’s a CLI tool that converts your codebase into a structured, syntax-highlighted PDF hierarchy.

Key features:
- Token Efficiency: In my local benchmark, a repo requiring ~31k text tokens was compressed to ~19k tokens when fed as a visual PDF (using the `onepdf` mode).
- Semantic Minimap: It uses Python's `ast` (and regex for other langs) to generate a UML/call-graph minimap at the top of each file.
- Linter Heatmap: It can run `ruff` or `eslint` and overlay a heatmap on the PDF to warn the LLM about risky lines visually.
- OnePDF Mode: Packs the core code into a single, ASCII-optimized PDF file for single-shot uploading.

It's written in Python and uses ReportLab for PDF generation.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on "Visual RAG" or any feedback on the implementation!

repo: https://github.com/TingjiaInFuture/pixrep
by Wilder7977 | 2026-02-19 09:03:30+00:00
And if it's so cheap and bespoke, why buying it and not making it in house?
What about access to people with know-how of that product? You use a product that only 4 other companies use, you can be sure you won't find any new hire that knows how to use it.

To me it seems the reality works in the opposite way. Among the many products built, some will be successful and will swallow the whole market, like now with basically any software or SaaS product.
by ch4s3 | 2026-02-19 09:03:33+00:00
No xenophobia is “the fear or dislike of people who are perceived as being foreign or strange”. Thats just from the dictionary.

You could call the brutal repression of the Ainu and native Okinawans a kind of xenophobic/racist ultra nationalism. Also Japan’s crimes extend far beyond China, and were especially brutal in Korea were they practiced a horrific form of slavery.

The Japanese are so xenophobic they try to exclude the descendants of Korean slaves who have been living in Japan for a century, have Japanese names, and only speak Japanese. Their xenophobia is not laudable.
by k_kelly | 2026-02-19 09:03:44+00:00
This is AMAZING.

We are definitely on an exponential in term of capabilities of humanoid robots.
We are probably only years away from having a robot in the house, in construction of robots. Automating anything that a human can do is best done in a human sized robot.

But.

None of these are actually useful right now. I don't want something with the arm strength of a forklift taking care of my parents or kids. The demand for humanoid robots right now is like lift a fridge from a delivery truck to a house (aka more mobile forklift) or walk through toxic sewage to pull crates out. Super useful but basically just mobile cranes, which is a small market. China seems to be making the mistake of pushing a tech demo as a consumer product (we've all been on those projects...) which can make people hate the tech.

Build something people want, don't mandate what they want. We're like 3-4 generations from amazing, useful robots. I'll be scared when these things are minding a bunch of dogs on stage.
by KingMob | 2026-02-19 09:03:45+00:00
> But wouldn't a less efficient tool simply consume your 5-hour/weekly quota faster?

Maybe.

First, Anthropic is also trying to manage user satisfaction as well as costs. If OpenCode or whatever burns through your limits faster, are you likely to place the blame on OpenCode?

Maybe a good analogy was when DoorDash/GrubHub/Uber Eats/etc signed up restaurants to their system without their permission. When things didn't go well, the customers complained about the restaurants, even though it wasn't their fault, because they chose not to support delivery at scale.

Second, flat-rate pricing, unlike API pricing, is the same for cached vs uncached iirc, so even if total token limits are the same, less caching means higher costs.
by Veen | 2026-02-19 09:03:50+00:00
Many people use the Max subscription OAuth token in OpenClaw. The main chat, heartbeat, etc., functionality does not call the Claude Code CLI. It uses the API authenticated via subscription OAuth tokens, which is precisely what Anthropic has banned.

There are many other options too: direct API, other model providers, etc. But Opus is particularly good for "agent with a personality" applications, so it's what thousands of OpenClaw users go with, mostly via the OAuth token, because it's much cheaper than the API.
by samat | 2026-02-19 09:05:17+00:00
Three AI-generated positive comments in the row from new (green) accounts, with some being answered by Tailscale employees looks like AI-assisted astroturfing PR in hackernews. It’s rampart on every major social network (Reddit especially), interesting to see it live first time on the HN.

I am not anti advertising, I just think pushing AI into places were people interact is very bad behavior and should be punished.
by ifh-hn | 2026-02-19 09:05:20+00:00
Yeah, actually that's what I do. I pay for important services and choose companys where that actually respond to you. Email, calendar, etc I pay fastmail, for example. But really you can't avoid having to trust someone/thing.

As much as possible though I don't use services at all for important things. My photos for example are not in the cloud. And I have backups where that is not possible. Do I have a Google account? Yes I have many. What would happen if Google locked me out of one? Nothing I'd move on because I don't care.

You can't eliminate the risk but you can do things to limit it, and that starts with recognising Google/apple/Microsoft don't give a shit about you or your data. And you are not worth their time if their systems flag your stuff for deletion.
by LouisSayers | 2026-02-19 09:05:50+00:00
I'm from NZ (mostly european but part Maori heritage) and have had people talk to me in foreign languages, ask me in the supermarket if I'm from Spain (weird), give me random discounts etc.

I also get "you look/feel so familiar" a lot.

Happy to know I'd fit in in a number of places haha
by andreagrandi | 2026-02-19 09:06:15+00:00
It is (slower), especially at xhigh setting. But if I have to redo things three times, keep confirming trivial stuff (Claude Code seems to keep changing the commands it uses to read code... once it uses "bash-read", once it uses "tree", once it uses "head" and I have to keep confirming permission), I definitely waste more time than give a command to codex (or in my case OpenCode + codex model) and come back after 10 minutes.
by Wilder7977 | 2026-02-19 09:06:42+00:00
https://alanspicer.com/what-percentage-of-youtubers-make-mon...

Claims 0.25% of channels makes any money at all. The amount that make a decent living is realistically even smaller, possibly < 0.1%.

To me the YouTube example seems to be the exact demonstration that markets saturate and market distribution is still a winner-takes-all kind of deal.
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2026-02-19 09:06:43+00:00
I've always been struck by how outrageously exploitative and anti-consumer the textile industry is in so many ways, and how people just normalize it and don't even discuss it.

Not just in sizing, which is also a problem — my polo shirt and dress shirt sizes vary between M and XXL depending on the brand, and even my shoe size can vary up to 3 numbers, it shouldn't be rocket science to establish some quantitative standards.

There's also the issue of buying a polo shirt and having it bleed because they've decided to save a few cents on the color-blocking product, and in the first wash, it ruins not only the shirt itself but the entire laundry load.

And the fact that a cotton garment may or may not shrink, and it's a complete lottery how much it will shrink, so sometimes even trying it on in person is useless.

And then there's the fact that someone up there decides that this year a certain trend is "coming" (let's say, pants with buttons instead of zippers) and that's all they sell. If you like zippers and you need to buy pants that year, tough luck.

And all of this is compounded by the fact that even buying expensive doesn't guarantee you'll get spared from all this nonsense... I'm not a cheapskate at all, I don't mind paying if I know a garment will be reliable and durable, but sometimes you buy a designer item and the quality is absolute garbage.

All of this, by the way, is much worse in Europe than in the US (I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe it's because in the US you always use a dryer, so they have no choice but to make clothes a bit more robust for that market).

If other industries did these things, consumers would be up in arms. If any other product seemed to behave well when you superficially check it on the store, but then completely failed on very first use (like a shirt that shrinks or bleeds), you would return it. But in clothing all of this is normalized.

It also amuses me when people complain about the carbon footprint of AI: if they saw the footprint of the textile industry (compared to the actual usefulness of clothes designed to last for one season and be replaced...).
by librasteve | 2026-02-19 09:06:49+00:00
I fully accept that formalism is an important factor in programming language design. But all HLLs (well, even ASM) are a compromise between machine speak (https://youtu.be/CTjolEUj00g?si=79zMVRl0oMQo4Tby) and human speak. My case is that the current fashion is to draw the line at an overly simple level, and that there are ways to wrap the formalism in more natural constructs that trigger the parts of the brain that have evolved to hanle language (nouns, verbs, adverbs, prepositions and so on).

Here's a very simple, lexical declaration made more human friendly by use of the preposition `my` (or `our` if it is packaged scoped)...

my $x = 42;
by yosamino | 2026-02-19 09:07:11+00:00
> I literally quoted the comment in my reply.

You selectively quoted the comment in your reply, leaving out some crucial information in order to set up a straw man argument.

I just helpfully pointed this out to you, because you were asking why someone was accusing you of arguing in bad faith. You can do with that whatever you wish.

If you are interested in why it's easy to recognize your way or arguing ( and I just want to note that it was not me who accused you of 'bad faith' argumentation in the first place), I can recommend Schopenhauer's "Die Kunst Recht zu behalten"[0] - your original

> To be clear, do you think it's bad to use technology to detect and stop terrorism?

shows up there as Chapter 7 "Yield Admissions Through Questions" among others.

You will note that I gave you an entire explanation to your specific assertions instead of just pointing to some book.

The thing about that is, though, that it's a bit boring sometimes because It often seems like every thought has already been though before. We humans seem to like to go in a circle. Just like the two us are doing right now.

I hope you have great rest of the week.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Being_Right
by ptsneves | 2026-02-19 09:08:02+00:00
Yes! The losses were due to independence loss to Spain. In a sense the loss of sovereignty to Spain destroyed the Portuguese empire.

Spain joined the Portuguese and Spanish armada and went on to fight the English (and Dutch to some extent), with catastrophic results for both Spain and Portugal fleets. When Portugal regained independence 1640 it needed to get back sovereignty of overseas territories, including from the Dutch.

The Dutch controlled a big part of north Brazil when Portugal and Spain were the Iberian Union, but the Dutch and were driven back afterwards at great cost. The damage was done, and 1755 earthquake was the final nail.

There were also terrible mistake in terms of state management up to the XX century where the natives, were not seen as full citizens, and naturally rebelled.

As a post colonial portuguese citizen, it seems like an incredible fantasy that our society descends from such a grandiose history. Even in this thread i see the name Henry the Navigator and am incredulous people know who he was.

A less known both inside and outside Portugal bad ass dude was Afonso de Albuquerque. This is from his English wikipedia page about Hormuz in the middle east:

> At the same time, Albuquerque decided to conclude the effective conquest of Hormuz. He had learned that after the Portuguese retreat in 1507, a young king was reigning under the influence of a powerful Persian vizier, Reis Hamed, whom the king greatly feared. At Ormuz in March 1515, Afonso met the king and asked the vizier to be present. He then had him immediately stabbed and killed by his entourage, thus "freeing" the terrified king, so the island in the Persian Gulf yielded to him without resistance and remained a vassal state of the Portuguese Empire.

Here came a dude that does both diplomacy and war in person, and moved on. Vasco da Gama was a bit similar. Portuguese were quite out of their minds and for me shows shows the pedigree of bloodlust[1] that Europeans must have gained after endless continental strife. That is why I am really afraid of the rearming of Europe, I believe Europeans have a genetic disposition for destruction, and history shows that.

[1] https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-storia-do-mogor-by-nicco...
by aetherson | 2026-02-19 09:08:32+00:00
Amazon isn't a monopoly, it has 8% of retail in the US.

There's no real evidence that this trade was made by Buffet himself, and it's part of a general major sell-off of Amazon that transparently did not temporally align with the idea that Amazon's retail business has suffered a decline in quality.

This is the market making a (reasonable!) judgment that it lacks confidence that Amazon's capital expenditures will pay off.
by jamiemallers | 2026-02-19 09:09:14+00:00
This is the thing that gets me about postmortems. The document almost always reveals that the mental model the team had of the system was subtly wrong in some critical way. Not wrong in some dramatic fashion - just a quiet assumption about ordering, or a dependency they forgot existed, or a timeout they assumed would never actually fire.

I've seen this pattern repeatedly: the system works fine for months or years, and the postmortem reads like a mystery novel where the detective discovers the murder weapon was in the room the entire time. The failure mode was always there, just waiting for the right combination of load and timing.

The scariest variant is when the monitoring itself has the same blind spot. You build alerts based on your mental model, so of course the alerts don't fire for the failure mode you didn't know existed. The system fails silently until a human notices something downstream is wrong.
by arghwhat | 2026-02-19 09:09:30+00:00
Their subscriptions aren't cheap, and it has nothing really to do with them controlling the system.

It's just price differentiation - they know consumers are price sensitive, and that companies wanting to use their APIs to build products so they can slap AI on their portfolio and get access to AI-related investor money can be milked. On the consumer-facing front, they live off branding and if you're not using claude code, you might not associate the tool with Anthropic, which means losing publicity that drives API sales.
by pablomalo | 2026-02-19 09:09:44+00:00
Pascal's wager, as it relates to faith, is based on the premise that there is a lot to win in making the wager --but little to lose. In turn, that second part is grounded in the assumption (right or wrong, I won't judge) that living according to Christian principles brings benefits _in this life also_ to the individual who so chooses.

So it seems a mischaracterization to present the essence of the wager as going out of your way to perform random and costly rites in the hope of lifting any ill omen.
by tirant | 2026-02-19 09:09:48+00:00
I have difficulties believing that what you’re describing is actually the case. Free markets are extremely good at covering many market niches, but free market is exceptional when it comes to cover the majority of the market.

If that majority of rectangular-shaped women existed and wanted to buy rectangular-shaped clothes, we would see brands with that product everywhere.

So either they’re not majority or they are happy enough with the existing product designs so they won’t buy an alternative rectangular design.
Show HN: Create an onboarding flow on Flutter in 5 min
by jordanbonnet | 2026-02-19 09:09:52+00:00
Hey Flutter devs

If you've shipped apps before, you know how important it is to have an efficient and polished onboarding flow. It's the first thing users see and often the reason they leave.

You've probably first focused on the core of your app, what makes it different. And now, you want to push it to the store, but you know you have to build an onboarding flow... and it's a little painful.

Onboarding flows are deceptive. They are super easy to build technically, but very difficult to perfect in terms of conversions.

Should I ask questions or show features?
Should I add more steps? Less steps?
Should I prompt to give a rating?
Should I force users to sign-in?

That's why iteration is key. And with coding agents, it's never been easier to test different things.

But your agent only builds what you ask for. And when it comes to onboarding, most devs don't know which details actually matter. The right spacing, the subtle animations, the micro-interactions that make users stay. You'll burn through tokens and still end up with something that feels off.

The new version of fluo.dev lets you build beautiful onboarding flows for Flutter right from your favorite coding agent. It gives structure, like rails to follow.

You don't rebuild standard steps from scratch.
You don't waste tokens on boilerplate.
You get built-in templates with all the details baked in.

No drag-and-drop. No config files. Just prompt and ship.
No email. No account. No credit card.
100% free. 100% open source.

And if you need beautiful authentication flows (email + otp, mobile + otp, google, apple), it's included and also 100% free.

Would love to know your thoughts :)