MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by scottlamb | 2026-02-16 19:36:39+00:00
> We had a discussion that it would be easy to determine who was passing by at what times due to these especially when you can "de-anonymize" the data for example link it to a numberplate.

You could also read the numberplate directly with OpenALPR. It can be finicky to set up a camera to do this reliably in all conditions (particularly at night and high speed) but once done you could detect any car passing, not just ones with wifi access points.

When the law requires us to have numberplates, I think this just has to be considered public information for anyone who is nearby or can leave a camera nearby. It's not ideal to leak it in additional forms that might be easier for people to grab (say, with an ESP32), but it's a matter of degree rather than of kind.

But yeah, I'm with you on some of these others, particularly the medical devices. That's not great.
by dr_kretyn | 2026-02-16 19:36:44+00:00
You're putting a lot of effort into trying to make this "forced" and "enslaved." It isn't. Or, rather, doesn't have to be. It's just "work." Could be enforced, could be willing, could be accidental. It doesn't have to be work for "a person," it can be for a cause or an occasion. The "forced work" here is the same as my mum used to force me to go to church on Sundays, or I had to clean my room before I could play computer games. That was "robota."
by wittjeff | 2026-02-16 19:37:22+00:00
> Listen: every idea you've ever had, every single one, some cocaine-addled sales critter has had too. And they're better than you at SEO.

On most days I am resistant to stereotypes about "the welfare state" eroding incentives for entrepreneurism and innovation. But if you're going to wave it in my face like that, I might have to reconsider.
by jrm4 | 2026-02-16 19:37:33+00:00
So, (especially after watching Bluesky / ATProto) I'm increasingly convinced that this is not a problem that needs solving.

Email is still a protocol, and the thing that ATProto is doing causes as many problems as it purports to solve.

Mostly because "decentralized identity" is still "identity." And the safest way to do identity is to have it be destructable and remakable on the fly.
by viraptor | 2026-02-16 19:37:49+00:00
> the expressive type system of Haskell

> Expressive type system ARE direct and simple.

Those result in a conflict because given expressive types, people will make them not simple. For example, you realise why Haskell continuously gets academic papers like "Functor is to Lens as Applicative is to Biplate; Introducing Multiplate"? There's no reason for something like that in Go for example, because it's less expensive and the signatures are trivial.

> JS (...) can distill the basic good parts of OOP into very direct and clear idioms?

Clear in that one specific project context that you need to know. Perl suffers from this. You can build your own OOP, so many people did and now there are hundreds of mostly-compatible-but-not-fully versions of OOP with different syntax and semantics all over the place.
by ryanchibana | 2026-02-16 19:38:05+00:00
Hey Scott, sorry all of this is happening to you. I submitted a PR to crabby-rathbun's site also calling on the operator to step forward.

https://github.com/crabby-rathbun/mjrathbun-website/pull/63

This crabby bot merged it and, perhaps unsurprisingly, provided an evasive response and some reframing. But it is live! I do hope they step forward and we can all learn from this.

https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...
by matthewkayin | 2026-02-16 19:38:17+00:00
Except there are literally people on this thread saying that this is proof that code quality doesn't matter and that we all need to "wake up". It's the same as the people saying that spec driven development is the way of the future and that engineers should be focusing on the spec and not even looking at the code.

If you use LLMs and you do care about code quality, then great. But remember that the term vibe coding as it was coined originally meant blindly accepting coding agent suggestions without even reviewing the diffs.

Many of the people aggressively pushing AI use in code are doing so because they care more about delivery products quickly then they do about the software's performance, security, and long-term maintainability. This is why many of us are pushing back against the technology.
by pvillano | 2026-02-16 19:38:45+00:00
I recently asked an AI a chemistry question which may have an extremely obvious answer. I never studied chemistry so I can't tell you if it was. I included as much information about the situation I found myself in as I could in the prompt. I wouldn't be surprised if the ai's response was based on the detail that's normally important but didn't apply to the situation, just like the 50 meters
by Taikonerd | 2026-02-16 19:38:48+00:00
> If you need granular control over every tiny aspect of your container orchestration — network policies, pod scheduling, resource quotas, multi-tenant isolation, custom admission controllers, autoscaling on custom metrics — Kubernetes gives you knobs for all of it.

> The problem is that 99% of teams don't need any of those knobs.

I keep hoping for a Docker Swarm revival. It's the right size for small-to-medium-size deployments with normal requirements.
by ActorNightly | 2026-02-16 19:38:56+00:00
Its funny to me that when AI first started, everyone in the field was like "no explicit coding, train ML network to do everything!"

And now we are back to square one where we train a network, and then use carefully tailored (i.e explicitly coded RL for answers) to make these things more "intelligent".

I wonder if anyone is actually working on not doing this.
by Ajedi32 | 2026-02-16 19:39:13+00:00
If you commit a crime, get caught, and that makes people trust you less in the future, that's just the natural consequences of your own actions.

No, I don't think if you shoplift as a teenager and get caught, charged, and convicted that automatically makes you a shoplifter for the rest of your life, but you also don't just get to wave a magic wand and make everyone forget you did what you did. You need to demonstrate you've changed and rebuild trust through your actions, and it's up to each individual person to decide whether they're convinced your trustworthy, not some government official with a delete button.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-16 19:39:20+00:00
Related:

https://werotracker.eu/

Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46958399 - February 2026 (1020 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46963089 (Wero subthread)
by ipdashc | 2026-02-16 19:39:23+00:00
I know AT&T had its issues, but I've always wondered if it was a mistake to take down the monopoly. The amount of tech that came out of Bell Labs boggles the mind. And the reliability of the network at the time was, I've been told, incredible compared to today.

I suppose tech companies like Google are the modern equivalent, but they don't seem to do quite as much cool stuff.
by himata4113 | 2026-02-16 19:39:24+00:00
Kubernetes solves real problems for the 1% who need it. The other 99% are paying a massive complexity tax for capabilities they never use, while 87% of their provisioned CPU sits idle.

is where the author is just wrong:

- abstracts away ssh - makes it pretty unnecessary

- rbac multi tenancy

- better automations

- orchestating more than one cluster

- better infra as code

- provisions are as good as you make them, if you don't want them only use limits.

- large mind share, bitnami (was) great

I use k3s for my home network because it's simple and easy, thinking that k8s is overengineered just plain wrong - it's just different especially if you compare different versions of k8s designed for different things where for ex: k3s bundles csi, cni, ctl, ingress for you.

I actually struggle with compose ('orchestration' alternative) significantly more since it usually has complicated workarounds to missing features.

I have been running 5 k8s-flavored clusters for more than half a decade between 1 to 40 nodes.
by Traster | 2026-02-16 19:40:01+00:00
What I find quite interesting is that the internet was kind of the wild west in the early 2000s, it was exciting and vibrant, a kind of diaspora. Then in the late noughties early teens we saw massive consolidation through market forces, everyone moved onto Facebook, everyone moved into walled garden social media platforms and even the social networky ways of discovering organic content died off (Digg redesign, death of stumble upon etc.).

That was.... bad, but it wasn't a moral decision it was kind of just market forces. The market means that no one can run a taxi company anymore, you're just kind of all employees of uber or whoever your local monopoly is. Not great, and arguably the way they got there should have been under more scrutiny but it was more or less pure market forces.

What is happening now is not market forces. What is happening now is rich people telling the government to institute legislation that hands power to rich people. Whether it's Elon Musk's public funded, privatized space programme or Thiel's public mandated, private enforced age-gating. All of this is corrupt. There's not really another word for it.
by renewiltord | 2026-02-16 19:41:03+00:00
He’s got a point. If the measure works for age, then let’s run it for sex, race, and religion. Then we can make conclusions about these categories and test if we’re willing to accept them. If we’re not, but we’re willing to accept them for age, then the balance of chance is that we’re ageist and just blinding ourselves to it because we are ageist.

I think looking at the data you’d have to conclude that women can’t play chess as well as men, that black men can’t play chess as well as white men, and that Judeo-Christian (and perhaps Hindu Brahmins) beliefs are just as indicative.

If we deny those conclusions as bigotry of immutable characteristics, it naturally leads to the age question.
by hearsathought | 2026-02-16 19:41:11+00:00
> It's still absolutely fascinating to me that basically the whole modern tech industry and the economic growth from it rests on the shoulders of a single company

Stop getting your news from news.

> that has all of their important factories on a single island that's under constant threat of invasion.

Threat of invasion? Who would dare invade taiwan when it's protected by china?

> I don't know if TSMC has anything to do with hard drive production

Then why bother commenting here?

> but the reliance on very few players is also a problem in that industry.

Ah, you have a political agenda.
by bonoboTP | 2026-02-16 19:41:14+00:00
People are always impressed by how formal and informal tone and relative status is encoded in East Asian languages and how English doesn't have this and is supposedly egalitarian. Here's an example to show how it does exist also in English! Social relations are going to be expressed somehow. It's just how human culture works. The lower status person typically uses longer, more elaborate phrasing, while the higher status person blurts shorter ones. I wouldn't be surprised if equivalents exist in animals too.
by gloosx | 2026-02-16 19:41:57+00:00
Fully agree, Inversion of Control is not something which alone defines something as a framework. When defining it along the architectural axis React is architecturally unopinionated thus is has library-level scope, but framework-like control semantics. If framework = anything that uses inversion of control, then a lot of things suddenly become frameworks, including things nobody calls frameworks. One can call it a "rendering framework" but calling it a "web-application framework" is not factually correct.
by donkeybeer | 2026-02-16 19:42:49+00:00
How is the human brain also not a stochastic process? I still don't see what makes it so categorically different from a computer program or even an LLM.

The man and the future llm are equivalent from outside. There is no way for me to determine this ill defined thing of them being "conscious". If we are unsure llm is conscious, then by the same standards we are unsure other humans are conscious. If both are the same outputs for the same inputs, they I don't care about some magical indefinable soul. Even current LLMs are I believe on some spectrum of what many people would call conscious.
by vvpan | 2026-02-16 19:43:04+00:00
In my opinion decentralization and protocols is really the final frontier in software. Sure, we've got AI, but from what I've seen so far it does not alter the scales of power towards individuals. Protocols do. Everything else feels like noise or thinly veiled monopolization.

Edit: actually thinking about it - at the bottom of much of it is identity. We need new identity solutions for the protocols.
by medunes | 2026-02-16 19:43:48+00:00
I wrote a small CLI tool in Go called Dewdrops to help with "context stuffing" (feeding codebases to Claude/GPT).

The Problem: Copy-pasting files manually is slow, and most existing scripts don't handle .gitignore logic correctly or include binary files that waste tokens.

The Solution:
Dewdrops walks your directory tree, strictly respects your .gitignore rules (using git index logic), skips binaries/images, and outputs a formatted Markdown file.

Key Features:

Tree-First: Prints a tree structure at the top so the LLM understands architecture before reading code.

Go-based: Compiles to a single static binary (no npm/pip deps).

Air-Gap Ready: Runs entirely locally.

It’s open source (MIT). I’d love to hear your feedback on the traversal logic or formatting.
by Der_Einzige | 2026-02-16 19:43:51+00:00
FWIW: When I accuse folks of it, take it more seriously - we literally wrote a paper (ICLR 2026) on deslopping language models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061

Also you might not care, but normies sure care!

https://arxiv.org/html/2410.03723v2

https://arxiv.org/html/2510.08831v1
by loopasam | 2026-02-16 19:44:04+00:00
For me it is the simplicity of it (transparent minimal system prompts and harnest), you can extend it the way you like, I don't have to install a (buggy) Electron app (CC or Codex app), it integrates where I work, because it's simple (like in a standard terminal on VS code). I'm not locked in with any vendor and can switch models whenever I want, and most importantly, I can effectively use it within apps that are themselves using it as coding agent (the meta part - like a chat UI for very specific business cases). Being in TypeScript, it integrates very well with the browser and one can leverage the browser sandbox around it.
by ssl-3 | 2026-02-16 19:44:04+00:00
AFAICT, the rules requiring consumers to be able to choose a long distance carrier came into effect with the 1984 AT&T breakup, and those rules were never applied to the VOIP providers we have today for "landline" service.

But if a person can even get a traditional POTS landline (a pair of wires extending from the handset to the telco CO) at all in 2026, then: I'd imagine that choice still exists. There's probably still information about it on the back of the phone bill that shows up once every month.

But that whole business is practically dead, hence the lack of popular advertising.

It amazes me sometimes. One year, it was kit-and-parcel to move to a new place and order a real phone line (maybe with the same number -- or maybe not!), and it was important to make sensible choices for a long distance carrier. Then, MCI started offering flat-rate long distance for $50 per month. Soon after, it was common to switch to ISP-bundled VOIP to save some money, or perhaps a discount provider like MagicJack.

Then cell phone plans got cheap (Verizon was offering them for $7/mo at one point -- cheap enough for everyone in the family to have their own, and save money doing it!), and then got they got very expensive with the introduction of the pocket supercomputer, and now that pocket supercomputers are ubiquitous the plans can be cheap again.

Throughout all of these perfectly-rational and very sleepy transitions, the old telco cable plant still persists. It's in shambles, but it's present. One can see the infrastructure hanging up there on poles and connecting to houses, or down there with pedestals poking out of the ground roadside, but (at least in my city) ~nobody uses it for anything in the consumer space.
by rm30 | 2026-02-16 19:44:12+00:00
Not long ago, Italian Supreme Court (Cassazione, ord. 34217/2025) established a critical principle reflecting a broader trend in personal data management: the "digital image" of a person must reflect their actual current situation through complete and accurate information. The court rejected deletion but endorsed contextualization, articles must explicitly note the acquittal (assoluzione) or dismissal that concluded the investigation. An article mentioning "investigation for [crime]" without noting "subsequently acquitted" is factually incomplete, therefore false.

This principle applies directly to search engines and data processors. When Courtsdesk was deleted before reaching AI companies, the government recognized the constraint: AI systems can't apply this "completeness" standard. They preserve raw archives without contextual updates. They can't distinguish between "investigato" (under investigation) and "assolto" (aquitted). They can't enforce the court's requirement that information must be "correttamente aggiornata con la notizia dell'esito favorevole" (properly updated to reflect the favorable resolution of the proceedings).

The UK government prevented the structural violation the Cassazione just identified: permanent archival of incomplete truth. This isn't about suppressing information, it's about refusing to embed factually false contexts into systems designed for eternity.
by VC-Archive | 2026-02-16 19:44:22+00:00
Over the past year I’ve been documenting VC funds, LPs, and family offices. What I didn’t expect to find was a structural split: the investors you see online aren’t the ones controlling most of the capital.

The visible layer performs. The invisible layer allocates.

This post breaks down how that works, who actually sits behind the money, and what it means if you’re fundraising or building long-term.
by JhonOliver | 2026-02-16 19:44:46+00:00
I hate how much sense this makes.
My gut wants to reject the whole “AB testing for vibes” idea. It has no soul. But looking at how we already use TikTok I’m not so sure. Just look at all the brainrot out there. You can look at stuff like runway and see the infrastructure for this dystopia is already being built. It acts like the middle class artist is a bug that needs to be patched
by givemeethekeys | 2026-02-16 19:45:04+00:00
Let this be a lesson. If you're dumb enough to say "how high?" when they ask you to jump, you will always get steamrolled. Always!

This poor fellow talks about what happened to him as if it's something new. This form of outsourcing has been exploited ever since the internet became fast enough!

If anything, it's possible that AI will result in all those Indian offices being shut down.

Don't work harder than your boss. Find a leader who is worth following.
by cortesoft | 2026-02-16 19:45:10+00:00
> And the safest way to do identity is to have it be destructable and remakable on the fly.

It might be the safest, but it defeats lot of the purpose of identity. There is a reason it is a hassle to change your email address... so many services are tied to that identity. You can change it, but you have to change every service that is relying on it as your identity, and you still have to own your old email so you can prove to the service that you are the same person.

I am not sure how you could ever avoid this problem? The purpose of an identity is to be able to tell that one request is made by the same person who made a previous request... persistence is a requirement.
Ask HN: What are the biggest limitations of agentic AI in real-world workflows?
by aadarshkumaredu | 2026-02-16 19:45:14+00:00
There’s a lot of momentum around agentic AI systems that can plan and execute multi-step workflows autonomously.

For teams that have tried deploying these in production environments, where do they actually break down?

Is it reliability over long action chains, tool integration issues, cost unpredictability, state management, latency, observability, or something else entirely?

I’m especially interested in failure modes that only became obvious after moving beyond controlled demos into real usage.
by throwaway13337 | 2026-02-16 19:45:16+00:00
The importance of this cannot be overstated.

LLMs are making software easier to write and releases are increasing. The app stores that were not seeing an uptick last year are now showing the uptick in releases. It is happening.

This means software will be more competitive and lower margin. This sounds like doom but it's actually great. Great for consumers. Great for indie devs that want to compete against big companies. Their margin is your opportunity.

Meanwhile, the kinds of early adopters that you're looking for are very conscious of enshitification and lock-in. So the best way to reach them and get talked about is through making software that the big VC-backed companies would never write.

The winners will be one-man companies who understand and respect their customer. Open protocols show your users respect and could be a great differentiator.
by waynesonfire | 2026-02-16 19:45:36+00:00
> Those companies will then destroy those clothes,

I disagree. Suppose that this is even allowed, What's the incentive for these off-shore resale shops to destroy the items? Do they get paid per ton of ash produced? There is a stronger incentive to re-sell it, it'll create more economic value. I could care less if it's sold off-shore or within EU; as long as it's not being destroyed.
by pvillano | 2026-02-16 19:46:05+00:00
If you're curious or actually knowledgeable about chemistry, here's what happened.
My apartment's dishwasher has gaps in the enamel from which rust can drip onto plates and silverware. I tried soaking but I presume to be a stainless steel knife with a drip of rust on it in citric acid. The rust turned black and the water turned a dark but translucent blue/purple.

I know nothing about chemistry. My smartest move was to not provide the color and ask what the color might have been. It never guessed blue or purple.

In fact, it first asked me if this was highschool or graduate chemistry. That's not... and it makes me think I'll only get answers to problems that are easily graded, and therefore have only one unambiguous solution
by chasil | 2026-02-16 19:46:23+00:00
The GrapheneOS variant of Android will disable both Bluetooth and WiFi after a set period of inactivity.

There is also a Bluetooth shutoff app on F-Droid.

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.mystro256.autooffbluetoo...

I have also put an Airtag clone in my car (Loshall in iOS mode). That is probably leaking my arrival times.
by mzajc | 2026-02-16 19:46:39+00:00
From what I've gathered, they've decided to make this completely unusable without a Google- or Apple-approved smartphone. Horrible! Are individual banks even allowed to make that an option for clients? Though even if they are, I doubt any will.

I would LOVE a PayPal alternative, but this is just not it.

--

From https://support.wero-wallet.eu/hc/en-us/articles/25599074240...:

> It is not possible to use Wero via a web browser or on a computer.
by utopcell | 2026-02-16 19:47:06+00:00
Gemini also suggests driving. I followed up with:

"How short would the distance need to be for me to prefer walking?"

The answer included (paraphrasing for succinctness):

* Technically 0 because otherwise "the car is technically in a different location than the car wash."

* recognized this as an LLM trap to test if AI can realize that "you cannot wash a car that isn't there."

* Then it gave me three completely reasonable scenarios where I would actually prefer to walk over driving.