MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by drnick1 | 2026-02-16 20:20:23+00:00
> we don’t want to have to force smartphone choices but the number of users without one these devices is so vanishingly small

You are missing the point. The issue is that once the "vanishingly small" number of alternatives disappears, users will be completely trapped, and Google and Apple will then free to abuse that position of power (they already do). Worse, since power is centralized, it is very easy for government interference to take place, and we already see that with things such as identity and age verification requirements. It is the possibility of competition that matters more than actual competition.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2026-02-16 20:20:54+00:00
It seems like you're assuming we'd use proof-of-work. That would be crazy.

The consensus mechanism would be: block is good if it has a judge's signature (or some other combination of signatures from other elected officials, depending on how the laws work where you are).

Or are you proposing that somebody out there is prepared to subvert the signatures by computing a hash collision or some other herculean task?
by mooreds | 2026-02-16 20:21:17+00:00
Yeah, I think if they have published a range and you are comfortable with it, you can say "I reviewed the range on the website and am comfortable with it".

If you are not comfortable, then I'd be clear why, with data, upfront. "I saw the range on the website and it seems low based on X, Y, and Z. Is that range flexible?"

Whether the answer to that is yes or no, you'll be in a better spot whether to decide to move forward.
by dang | 2026-02-16 20:21:21+00:00
One large-ish past thread and a few tinies, for anyone curious:

Binary Ninja – an interactive decompiler, disassembler, debugger - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41297124 - Aug 2024 (1 comment)

Binary Ninja – 4.0: Dorsai - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39546731 - Feb 2024 (1 comment)

Binary Ninja 3.0: The Next Chapter - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30109122 - Jan 2022 (1 comment)

Binary Ninja – A new kind of reversing platform - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12240209 - Aug 2016 (56 comments)
by cyberpunk | 2026-02-16 20:22:13+00:00
I agree, I’m not saying it’s totally correct or there aren’t answers, but those are the current rules at least in my bank.

Instant payments bypass typical surveillance and fraud systems and so need some kind of authentication, if you don’t want to 2fa every time you’re at the checkout then the application has to have been previously authenticated (e.g setup with some kinda TAN from your bank) and execute on an attested device. We can def extend attestation to other devices (e.g is the kernel modified, does the app have reasonable version and checksums etc) but again, who is gonna fund that for 10 users?

edit: We have a long road to go before this stuff gets better, I think we should be happy at each step instead of really wishing we were already at the finish.
by rchaud | 2026-02-16 20:22:28+00:00
Because the sample size for "mega-rich" selects for more psychopaths per thousand people than the sample of people who are "just rich".

You can get "just rich" by being a doctor, or a partner at an IT consulting firm, without screwing people over.

But to be "mega-rich", you have to be OK with screwing people over any chance you get. Over time, that behavioural trait has a compounding effect where you don't see things as "right" and "wrong" anymore. That perspective is accelerated further as their money and power insulate them from consequences due to the political and legal latitude it can buy.

Bill Gates plotted to dilute Paul Allen's Microsoft shares because "he wasn't pulling his weight" when he was undergoing cancer treatment. Goldman Sachs' top legal counsel Kathryn Ruemmler accepted expensive handbags from Epstein and called him "uncle" in communications after he was re-arrested on trafficking charges. Bezos, Musk, Zuck, Ellison...need I say more?
by kyars | 2026-02-16 20:22:44+00:00
I don't think I spoke about the fact that yeah, the code quality is suboptimal and this is purely a proof of concept. So I'm going to update the blog post with that information, but I completely agree with you that the code you get with models is not best practices and this is even more so the case when you have many agents on one project that generate lots of redundancy (which I do cover in the blog post).
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2026-02-16 20:23:00+00:00
This is the thing about kubernetes that these short sighted takes always seem to miss. Kubernetes is complicated because deployment is complicated. For every little knob in k8s there is a pretty good standard path. Need certs? Cert manager. Autoscaling? Cluster autoscaler or KEDA. Load balancing? Handled. All wheels you will need to reinvent yourself otherwise.
by holgerschurig | 2026-02-16 20:23:33+00:00
Well, Visa and Mastercard are expensive and suck. The shop always has to pay them some percentage for a transaction. That adds up.

For decades, european countries like Netherlands or German had cheaper alternatives, e.g. in Germany the old "EC Card" and now "girocard". That costs a shop just a fixed amount of cent... and a very low amount.

(That is BTW one of THE reasons why US travellers won't see "Credit cards accepted" in every store ... our alternatives are just cheaper, so the market decided)

Also, Visa and Mastercard as US companies. So they are sniffing on all european transactions.

And it happened more than once that US companies tried to execute bullshit US laws in Europe. Example: there was once an german online shop that sold cuban cigars. Eventually the US website that hosted the shop said "Oh, that's not allowed" --- despite it perfectly legal by german law. And they didn't just delete this cuban cigars, they disabled the whole shop, with IIRC 20000 EUR positive balance. And the shop owner didn't even get his money, since their customer service sucked and was only automated response and untrained indian call center clerks.

So no, we cannot really depend on US services. They are expensive, they customer service sucks, they are sniffing either directly or let the NSA sniff everything.

And, bank-wise the USA seems to be some decades back (not online-bank-wise!). I mean, they still have pay cheques? Not direct bank transfers? Shudder. No wonder that, if they have no alternatives, they think everything must be Visa or Mastercard operated.
Show HN: RuneScapeCN (open source) – UI kit with authentic OSRS styling
by alns0 | 2026-02-16 20:24:08+00:00
Launching RuneScapeCN today! First time doing OSS.

It’s an OSRS-themed UI component set built on familiar shadcn patterns:
- React 19 + TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS v4
- Radix primitives
- Vite + CVA
- Hosted registry endpoints for direct component install

Goal: keep the classic RuneScape visual identity while still being easy to ship in modern React apps.

If you try it, I’d appreciate candid feedback on what to improve first.
by ctoth | 2026-02-16 20:24:21+00:00
Sometimes I will go out and I will plant a pepper plant and take care of it all summer long and obsessively ensure it has precisely the right amount of water and compost and so on... and ... for some reason (maybe I was on vacation and it got over 105 degrees?) I don't get a good crop.

Does this mean I should not garden because it's a variable reward? Of course not.

Sometimes I will go out fishing and I won't catch a damn thing. Should I stop fishing?

Obviously no.

So what's the difference? What is the precise mechanism here that you're pointing at? Because sometimes life is disappointing is a reason to do nothing. And yet.
by robocat | 2026-02-16 20:24:28+00:00
> Informal tone and mistakes actually signal that the message was written by a human

Except that this signal is now being abused. People add into the prompts requesting a few typos. And requesting an informal style.

There was a guy complaining about AI generated comments on substack, where the guy had noticed the pattern of spelling mistakes in the AI responses. It is common enough now.

But yes, typos do match the writer - you can still notice certain mistakes that a human might make that an AI wouldn't generate. Humans are good at catching certain errors but not others, so there is a large bias in the mistakes they miss. And keyboard typos are different from touch autoincorrection. AI generated typos have their own flavour.
by Baguette5242 | 2026-02-16 20:24:31+00:00
It’s not like this issue had been solved like… what… 15 freaking years ago in China.

The fact that this is shown as a « big step forward » is a a great example of how much the EU is lagging behind. It’s honestly quite sad.

Anyway, let’s wait and see, I already used Wero, it works OK, I don’t really get what the difference is between this and instant bank transfers but again, let’s wait and see.
by charcircuit | 2026-02-16 20:24:33+00:00
What prevents them with working with live state. Coding agents deal with the live state of source code evolving fine. So why can't they watch a web page or whatever update over time? This seems to be a micro optimization that requires explicit work from the site developer to make work. Long term I just don't see this taking off versus agents just using sites directly. A more long term viable feature would be a way to allow agents to scroll the page or hover over menus without the user's own view being affected.
by elevation | 2026-02-16 20:24:44+00:00
It's a combination of cumbersome syntax and the vendor's poor API design and execution environment.

For a syntax example, compare python to Tcl. In python, there's a compact array lookup operator, and dictionaries allow string keys:

mydata["channel"][2]

Tcl, however, requires a function call to access an array index, resulting in nested function calls with magic numbers for the simplest expressions:

lindex [lindex $mydata 35] 2 # Tcl

Then there isn't any static type checking so you have to run code to see if it would work; the shape of a return may surprise you. Connecting to hardware may be your only opportunity to exercise certain code paths.

So for any non trivial task, Tcl becomes effectively write-only.

Some tools allow you to export Tcl scripts that automate tasks like project creation to help you avoid tracking intermediate objects in source control, but because the Tcl cwd path can change throughout a script, they export every source path as a hard coded absolute path, including whatever developer's home directory it might be residing in. This is not suitable for source control (because it would preclude building on any other machine) so then you have to post process these scripts before tracking them. But since it's Tcl there aren't good scriptable tools for programmatic Tcl AST manipulation, so you have to modify these files with some sort of a state machine, looking for various sentinels to trigger the various string replace behaviors you need. It's not all Tcl's fault, but if a vendor is only using Tcl for automation and you need automation, you have a battle ahead of you.

Outside the language, you'll often find that your runtime tool locks the UI thread to run your scripts, so long running operations are impossible to pause or cancel. And I've never seen a vendor expose adequate objects to allow full control, so often, the critical actions you hoped to automate are only possible through the GUI.

In the 90s, an integrated Tcl interpreter was a good sign that your vendor cared about developers. Today it's more a sign of neglect.
by novemp | 2026-02-16 20:24:49+00:00
So many comments going "Well MY llm of choice gives the right answer". Sure, I believe you -- LLM output has LONG been known to vary from person to person, from machine to machine, depending on how you have it set up, and sometimes based on nothing at all.

That's part of the problem, though, isn't it?

If it consistently gave the right answer, well, that would be great! And if it consistently gave the wrong answer, that wouldn't be GREAT, but at least the engineers would know how to fix it. But sometimes it says one thing, sometimes it says another. We've known this for a long time. It keeps happening! But as long as your own personal chatbot gives the correct answer to this particular question, you can cover your eyes and pretend the planet-burning stochastic parrot is perfectly fine to use.

The comparison in one thread to the "How would you feel if you had not eaten breakfast yesterday?" question was a particularly interesting one, but I can't get past the fact that the Know Your Meme page that was linked (which included a VERY classy George Floyd meme, what the actual fuck) discussed those answers as if they were a result of fundamental differences in human intelligence rather than the predictable result of a declining education system. This is something that's only going to get worse if we keep outsourcing our brains to machines.
by apercu | 2026-02-16 20:24:50+00:00
Yea, I just get anxious when I am responsible for something I don't really "know".

I haven't been a full-time professional software developer for a while, but I was one for years and when someone noticed a problem with one of my apps, I could mentally walk through the code and and pretty much know where to look before I even got to my desk.

I can't imagine letting Gen-AI (that is flat out wrong ~30% of the time) write huge swathes of code that I am now responsible for.

But maybe that's just a "me" thing. In this new economy words and activity have replaced value and productivity.
by microtonal | 2026-02-16 20:24:54+00:00
This is not a wallet (the name is a bit confusing). Wero (like iDEAL, which it is partly based on), is an online payment system directly backed by your bank account. This is an app that uses the Wero system for doing P2P payments (like Tikkie in The Netherlands).

Most likely, Wero (like iDEAL) will also support alternative apps for P2P payments.

Also, Wero will support in-store payments in the future, making Google Pay/Apple Pay unnecessary [1] unnecessary, which is a big win.

[1] Strictly spoken it's unnecessary now as well, but then each bank needs to implement its own NFC app and most simply opt foor Google/Apple Pay.
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-02-16 20:25:03+00:00
>Yes a good phone can run a quantised 8B too.

Mac expectations in a nutshell lmao

I already knew this because we tried doing it at an enterprise level, but it makes me well aware nothing has changed in the last year.

We are not talking about the same things. You are talking about "Teknickaly possible". I'm talking about useful.
by Nition | 2026-02-16 20:25:16+00:00
And in real life you'd get them to clarify a weird question like this before you answered. I wonder if LLMs have just been trained too much into always having to try and answer right away. Even for programming tasks, more clarifying questions would often be useful before diving in ("planning mode" does seem designed to help with this, but wouldn't be needed for a human partner).
by paulcole | 2026-02-16 20:25:17+00:00
> Because if a tool like Claude Code (or any other LLM) suddenly cost $1,000 a month to reflect what it actually costs to run, would people keep paying for it out of pocket? Would their companies?

I wouldn't find it hard to personally justify $200/month or $300/month for the single best LLM tool available to me. Right now I have $100/month spread out over a few different tools and it's a bargain.
by CK-7vn | 2026-02-16 20:25:22+00:00
My story, at least the last 6 years, I want to become more involved in the community because I think there's a lot of value in a lot of the things everyone in the development community has to say. I'm by no means an amazing software developer, but I am definitely learning every day and don't plan on ever stopping. Really appreciate anyone willing to read it. I know there can definitely be people averse to the reality that Maine in particular is allowing convicted felons to participate in programs like college and remote work, but, I just want to say, it's changed my life, it changed my families life, and all of our futures, and I can without any shred of doubt promise and guarantee I am not the young dumb "man" I once was. (Maybe still young to some, but, I can at least say I'm not as dumb) Anyways, thanks a ton to anyone willing to give it, and my writing a shot. Hoping to move onto technical posts from here on out, for better or worse!
by ikesau | 2026-02-16 20:25:49+00:00
> You cannot require age verification on IRC, XMPP, ActivityPub, Nostr, or Matrix, because there is no single entity to compel. Each server operator makes their own decisions. A government would need to individually pressure thousands of independent operators across dozens of jurisdictions, which is a legislative and enforcement impossibility.

I'm very much sympathetic to the post's argument, but I think it should be acknowledged that this kind of claim has an implicit "(for now)" at the end.

The legal system doesn't have good mechanisms for dealing with problems that it hasn't needed to deal with yet, but if most people moved to encrypted & decentralized protocols for communication, it doesn't follow that laws couldn't be amended to give governments powers to legislate or police it at scale if deemed necessary by some sufficiently powerful group (an autocracy, a voting bloc, a national security service, etc)

So I guess the other implicit piece is that one hopes the technological change comes with cultural change to our political expectations - once people get used to privacy and autonomy, they resist efforts to erode those rights again.

Best of luck to everyone advocating for this! Really hoping to see a lot of thriving communities post-Discord in the coming years.
by ffsm8 | 2026-02-16 20:25:50+00:00
The reason why whaling and government contracts are increasingly the best options available is because the wealth from the working class has mostly been extracted... And with less and less disposable wealth available to the populous, targeting them for products gets increasingly competitive as anything non essential gets ignored

It's a negative feedback loop, and the politicians would rather reduce taxes on the rich then reverse that trend

At least that's how it looks to me
Show HN: PicoGPT v2 – GPT in <40 lines of vanilla JS running from a QR code
by kuberwastaken | 2026-02-16 20:25:51+00:00
A few days ago I posted about PicoGPT - my take on MicroGPT by Andrej Karpathy, minified to 64 lines to run from a QR code

This is now v2 with minified JS! This version features a minimal GPT implementation with native browser execution through data URI with <40 lines of minified JS and no external dependencies

It makes use of the DecompressionStream Web API and a similiar logic to my past project of running a DOOM-like game from a QR code

you can quite literally "train" and run inference of a GPT model from your mobile device

Would love to hear what you think about it !

Related Links:

Show HN: PicoGPT – GPT in a QR Code
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46993035

MicroGPT by Andrej Karpathy -
https://gist.github.com/karpathy/8627fe009c40f57531cb1836010...
https://karpathy.github.io/2026/02/12/microgpt/

Show HN: I made a Doom-like game fit inside a QR code -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43729683
https://github.com/kuberwastaken/backdooms

(PS: You'd need something like https://qrscanner.org/ that can scan larger QR codes)
by kyars | 2026-02-16 20:25:52+00:00
Ultimately, this was an experiment with no intent to migrate to a production environment. Regarding single agents, for large projects one agent is too slow. So that's why developing multi-agent paradigms is compelling.

I view SQLite as just an objective to attain and optimize for, but nothing more. I agree 100% that this is just a shittier SQLite.
by coldtea | 2026-02-16 20:26:35+00:00
>I don't thank my bicycle for transporting me or thank my spell-checker for finding typos.

Neither your bicycle nor your spell-checker hold conversations and answer questions, neither of them is being used as therapist or virtual girl/boy friend, and neither's whole shtick is being trained on a ginormous human corpus to convincingly respond like a person.

I like to think we can perceive a difference between a bicycle and an something specifically developed and trained to pass for intelligence...
by dang | 2026-02-16 20:26:45+00:00
Here are the main threads (in reverse order) that I found about Ghidra generally. Of course there have been many more threads about specific aspects or related projects: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

(Btw, these links are just for anyone curious to read more - reposts are fine after a year or so - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

NSA Ghidra open-source reverse engineering framework - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40508777 - May 2024 (61 comments)

Ghidra 11.0 Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38740793 - Dec 2023 (11 comments)

Ghidra 10.3 has been released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35908418 - May 2023 (6 comments)

NSA Ghidra software reverse engineering framework - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35324380 - March 2023 (103 comments)

Ghidra: Software reverse engineering suite developed by NSA - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33226050 - Oct 2022 (42 comments)

Ghidra: A software reverse engineering suite of tools developed by the NSA - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27818492 - July 2021 (142 comments)

Ghidra 9.2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25086519 - Nov 2020 (78 comments)

The Ghidra Book - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24879314 - Oct 2020 (5 comments)

Ghidra Decompiler Analysis Engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19599314 - April 2019 (30 comments)

Ghidra source code officially released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19572994 - April 2019 (7 comments)

Ghidra Capabilities – Get Your Free NSA Reverse Engineering Tool [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19319385 - March 2019 (17 comments)

Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19315273 - March 2019 (405 comments)

Ghidra - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19239727 - Feb 2019 (59 comments)

NSA to Release Their Reverse Engineering Framework GHIDRA to Public at RSA - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18828083 - Jan 2019 (90 comments)
by drnick1 | 2026-02-16 20:26:48+00:00
> Usually that means scanning a QR code with your bank app on your smartphone where you confirm the amount and recipient, but you can use a physical card reader with your debit card for an OTP

This seems to be mobile-centric system that essentially requires a cell phone, and probably one blessed by Google or Apple. The app will probably leak a huge amount of meta data, far more than a credit card (especially a privacy-oriented prepaid one). This kind of "solution" is dead on arrival as far as I am concerned.
by alistairSH | 2026-02-16 20:26:48+00:00
Most of the time, I'd just answer "I'm ok with your published range, we can proceed." or similar.

But, I've also seen ranges that span hundreds of thousands of dollars. Like "Software engineer: $150k-$250" which is a ridiculous range that makes it almost meaningless. I mean, what are they thinking - any candidate worth their time is going to aim for the $250 end...
by ljm | 2026-02-16 20:27:22+00:00
I argue we shouldn't, because if everyone is like Carmack then no one is.

And only people on the older end of the spectrum have seen Carmack working in his element back in the day.

The things I want people to take from a guy like John Carmack, or Jon Blow, or Lukas Pope, or Ron Gilbert, or Tim Schafer, or Warren Spector, or Sam Lake, or David Cage god forbid...is pure curiosity and pushing the boundaries to make that real.

In every case there is a mix of a deep and unusual urge to make an idea happen with an affinity towards the technicality of it.

I bring Sam Lake into this because nobody has blended FMV with gameplay the way Remedy have and pushed the boundary on it.