MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cg5280 | 2026-02-23 23:01:25+00:00
Our public surveillance is actually limited relative to other developed countries because it makes people here uncomfortable for cultural reasons. You’ll also note that our crime rates are pretty high, especially relative to the surveillance happy countries in East Asia.

Regardless, I’m happy to take a results oriented approach here. Does tracking license plates make it easier to catch criminals? Does it make it easier to track stolen vehicles?

And finally, surveillance of public spaces is not inherently at odds with personal freedoms. Your mobility is not restricted at all, your core rights have not been touched. And you are always welcome to go live in the woods off the grid.

I firmly believe that living in dense urban areas with millions of others requires a reasonably limited expectation of privacy in public spaces.
by donmcronald | 2026-02-23 23:01:53+00:00
> We are literally sending a request to our government's server to sign, with their private key, message "this john smith born on 1970-01-01 is aged over 18" + jwt iat. There are 3 claims in there. They are hashed with different salts. This all is signed by the government.

If the "18+ claim" can't be linked to your identity and doesn't have any rate limits, someone can set up a token-as-a-service to sell tokens on the black market.

> Government can track all salts for your tokens, site can collect all salts, they can compare notes. There are so called policy mitigations currently: audits and requirements for governments to remove salts from memory the moment stuff is issued.

> Can the site owner and the government collude to track you if you are using bbs+? No. Math says no.

How does the math say no? Big tech companies already log absolutely everything. What's going to stop the government from keeping all the salts they're issuing and then mandating that site operators add the salts to their existing logs.

> Can they lie? Sure.

Well, they've lied to us over and over when it comes to surveillance, so I think at this point it's reasonable to assume they're lying unless it's technically impossible. Where's the in-person key verification that used to be in Whatsapp? How do the authorities get notified when someone makes a poorly though out joke using Snapchat private messages before getting on a plane? Why is there a war on end-to-end encryption?

We're going to pay a fortune for these supposed zero knowledge systems and that's what it's about. Select companies are going to get paid to issue tokens and the scale is going to create a few new billionaires.

The people in charge are going to gain a ton of power when they betray everyone and disenfranchise us.
by oulipo2 | 2026-02-23 23:02:18+00:00
How do you know when/if it's justified to add additional complexity like PgDog?

Is there a number of simultaneous connection / req per sec that's a good threshold?

Is it easy on my postgres instance to get the number of simulataneous connections, for instance if I simulate traffic, to know if I would gain anything from a connection pooler?
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2026-02-23 23:02:38+00:00
This is also where I think we end up. If the behavior of the system is specified well enough, then the code itself is cheap and throwaway. Why have a static system that is brittle to external changes when you can just reconstruct the system on the fly?

Might be quite awhile before you can do this with large systems but we already see this on smaller contextual scales such as Claude Code itself
by mv4 | 2026-02-23 23:02:50+00:00
When it comes to privacy violations, Ring and Nest aren't much better - but at least people have a choice whether or not to install them.

Nest: video was recovered from 'residual data located in backend systems' even though there was no active subscription.

Ring: employees accessing people's videos.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/05/...

I am an American and I am doing something about it. Co-founded a company that manufactures privacy-centric, on-prem video monitoring devices. No cloud.
by tsimionescu | 2026-02-23 23:03:14+00:00
This all needs to be modulated by the knowledge that some children benefit immensely from being able to hide parts of their lives from their parents, parts that their parents would disagree with greatly.

The clearest example is LGBTQ kids who want to talk to other LGBTQ kids, or enjoy LGBTQ content, without fundamentalist or just homophobic/transphobic parents finding out. Children of fundamentalist or cult members who want an escape from the cult are another common category.
Show HN: Using LLMs and differential testing to convert code
by seddonm1 | 2026-02-23 23:03:18+00:00
This is the second part of a post aligned with a talk I gave recently at the Sydney Rust meetup.

I have found significant success in this process converting decompiled code and also converting source code from python to go. Give an LLM a target and they can be extremely stubborn (in a good way).
by john_strinlai | 2026-02-23 23:04:44+00:00
>So it’s basically a guided triage layer on top of tshark/pcap data, with the “where do I start?” path baked in.

i think there is definitely room for something like this, it just (at first glance from the readme at least) seems like the guided part of this tool is bolted on as a bit of an after thought.

it feels like you are currently in an odd position where the user is expected to know the networking jargon already, be able to recognize that something might be "weird" at a glance, but also not know how to drill down into the data. i think that is probably a small overlap of people.

if i were you, i would lean all-in on making it a learning tool.

>If you’ve got a specific teaching use-case (e.g. “why is this slow?” or “which host is generating traffic?”), I’d love to tune the Overview/Weird detectors around that.

i will put some thought into some real-world examples of what i would be interested in, from a teaching perspective. your post caught my eye because i am starting my wireshark module next week, so it is certainly timely.
by boyanlevchev | 2026-02-23 23:04:47+00:00
N64 vs PS1 no contest. But I don’t think they misspoke (even if the author didn’t really mention this explicitly in the article)

The Gameboy (plus color and pocket) outsold the PS1, and was more of a phenomenon. Also, the 90s saw the rise of Pokémon, which is the highest grossing media franchise of all time.
by tokyobreakfast | 2026-02-23 23:05:01+00:00
In the mid-2000s there was a bit of drama when Linux wireless driver code ended up in BSD (or maybe the other way around). The Internet was angry that day my friend; a bunch of nerds sperging out over licenses and which license is more "free". Ultimately the code was removed.

It sure seems like AI agents can sidestep all that by claiming ignorance on license matters.
by sillyfluke | 2026-02-23 23:05:30+00:00
>One of my most promising projects I was discussing with a friend and we realized together we could potentially use these tools to build a two person agency with no need to hire anyone ever...My current belief is not that AI will replace traditional software engineering it will replace a good chunk of the entire model of software

You're not following your last line to its logical conclusion regarding your own prospects: no one is going to buy the vibeslop your two person agency is selling because they'd rather create and maintain their own vibeslop instead of dealing with yours.

If you follow some of your thoughts to their logical conclusion you'll realize the parent is right: there will be limited productivity that ends up fueling the economy when nobody is buying each other's vibeslop.
by throwaway27448 | 2026-02-23 23:05:37+00:00
You can expect the individual to compensate for a poorly structured society all you want.

> you can get in trouble if you recklessly leave around or provide alcohol/guns/cigarettes for a minor to start using

You can only expect so much from individual responsibility. At some point you need to structure society to compensate for the inevitable failures that occur.

> They are in a much better and informed position to do so than a creepy surveillance nanny state.

I'd rather live in a nanny state than ever trust american parenting. We've demonstrated a million times over that that doesn't work and produces even more fucked up people and abused children.
by rumori | 2026-02-23 23:05:52+00:00
I rarely feel that any more, especially with the latest liquid glass updates. I used to work on high profile native apps, but embraced Elektron after Figma destroyed Sketch, the supposedly superior native alternative. Electron apps run fine on my 4 years old M2Max 32gb Macbook Pro, I never really experience any problems running Notion, Figma, VScode and Linear side by side.
I enjoy being able to resize text in all of these apps like you do on any website, or being able to select text across different UI elements and blocks. Web content has a built in level of accessibility that is really hard for native apps to implement.
by toephu2 | 2026-02-23 23:06:02+00:00
I am in favor of them. There is no expectation of privacy in the public setting. I can record anyone on a public street w/o their permission.
If these license plate cameras are making the streets safer and helping to reduce crime, why not? Sure there may be some mis-uses here and there, but for the most part they seem to be working and in places where they are deployed, crime is being reduced.
by ssl-3 | 2026-02-23 23:06:25+00:00
> What is interesting is it seems like the work resembles regular management, asking for a written specification, proof reading, etc.

That's how I've been using the bot for years. Organize tasks, mediate between them, look for obvious-to-me problems and traps as things progress, and provide corrections where that seems useful.

It differs from regular management, I think, in that the sunk costs are never very significant.

Find a design issue that requires throwing out big chunks of work? No problem: Just change that part of the spec and run through the process for that and the stuff beneath it again. These parts cost approximately nothing to produce the first time through, and they'll still cost approximately nothing to produce the second time.

I'm not building a physical structure here, nor am I paying salaries or waiting days or weeks to refactor: If the foundation is wrong, then just nuke it and start over fresh. Clean slates are cheap.

(I don't know if that's the right way to do it, or the wrong way. But it works -- for me, at least, with the things I want to get done with a computer.)
by amlib | 2026-02-23 23:07:12+00:00
The ironic thing is that each subscriber now has a dedicated computer many times more powerful than what ISPs had back in the day for hosting ALL those websites sitting in the most privileged part of their network, being online 24h and begging to be used for small hosting tasks like this: their ISP provided router. It even serves it's configuration panel through html and a webserver for crying out loud!

Unfortunately reality is such that those are closed systems with historically abhorrent security and ISPs usually forbids the user from properly providing their own choice of router.
by ocdtrekkie | 2026-02-23 23:07:20+00:00
My guess is the vast majority of the 80,000 or whatever cameras are uncontested politically. Local board meetings for most towns are boring and quiet affairs, and those are also the most effective venue for these concerns.

If you are a taxpayer in a local jurisdiction with Flock cameras and you want them removed, show up to every single meeting and maximize use of public comment time.

Local government is a place individuals can actually be extremely effective but also almost nobody ever actually does.
by fermisea | 2026-02-23 23:08:27+00:00
Shameless plug: https://www.supyagent.com - we basically want to give away the integrations for free. For Claude users you just need to run `supyagent skills generate` and you get all the integrations. Works well with cursor and codex as well, and if you want a UI to go with it that can be tinkered, just run `npx create-supyagent-app`
by IshKebab | 2026-02-23 23:08:41+00:00
If the Linux driver is GPL and he made the new driver using AI to essentially copy it then claim that the result wasn't covered by the GPL... It's an area not settled by law yet.

Still not as bad as the guy who paid for a commercial license for some Linux driver, fed it into Claude to get it to update it to the latest Linux, and then released it as GPL! That's definitely not a grey area.

https://youtu.be/xRvi3k8XV8E

Absolutely mental behaviour for a business. What were they thinking?
by snowhale | 2026-02-23 23:08:51+00:00
the spec-first approach is actually the historical clean-room technique, same way Phoenix BIOS was legally written without copyright exposure in the 80s -- one team writes spec from observation, completely separate team codes from spec only, no shared authors. here it's AI doing both passes but in different sessions with no shared context, which approximates the same separation. probably good enough legally but definitely interesting that the same old trick applies.
by Multicomp | 2026-02-23 23:08:54+00:00
I forget if it was Samsung or Sony, but somewhere along the way on my internet journey, someone claimed, without evidence, and thus I have none either, that the incentive structure for having prestige jobs at large technology companies was always in hardware design and software was seen as easier and more low class.

So since nobody will get any promotions for running good software, they are not incentivized to run good software, and therefore they do just enough to get by?
by fragmede | 2026-02-23 23:09:17+00:00
I wouldn't say it hasn't shown up. The number of ShowHN's per weekend has definitely gone up, and while that isn't rigorous scientific proof, I'd consider is a leading edge indicator of something. Unfortunately, we as an industry have yet to agree on anything approaching a scientific measure of productivity, other than to collectively agree that Lines of Code is universally agree that LoC is terrible. Thus even if someone was able to quantify that, say, they're having days where they generate 5000 LoC when previously they were getting O(500) LoC, that's not something we could agree upon as improved productivity.

So then the question is, lis there anything other than feels to say productive has or has not gone up? What would we accept as actual evidence one way or another? Commits-per-day is similarly not a good measure either. Jira tickets and tshirts sizes? We don't have a good measure, so while ShowHN's per weekend is equally dumb, it's also equally good in the bag of lies, damn lies, and statistics.
by jecel | 2026-02-23 23:09:22+00:00
One chip that could be used as a memory mapper for the 9900 (but wasn't in the TI99/4A) was the 74LS670, which was used in the IBM 5150 PC to allow the 8237 DMA chip to access more than 64KB (a limit that wasn't a problem when used in a 8080 system).
by fxwin | 2026-02-23 23:09:47+00:00
this reads kind of... bitter? The theme of the hackathon was AI (as noted by the author further down), so I'm not sure why he seems surprised/upset that 'All winners had "AI" as a significant part of their solution.'

The other points were always true for hackathons (For some more than others, depending on judges/audience), even before AI coding was a thing.

> I've been working on this since last September at a slow burn (no code reused for HackEurope though) and the goal is to have a running startup by May.

If anything, this is pretty much the opposite of what a hackathon is supposed to be: A place where you meet people you might not even know, come up with an idea on the spot and develop an MVP + pitch it on a tight (time) budget. Taking an idea you've already been working on for months and using it for a hackathon submission feels... odd

> A solid 90% of the projects there were just vibe coded slop. Even the ideas were AI. You can tell when multiple people implemented the exact same idea with the exact same title, description, and implementation.

The first is probably true, but to really judge the impact of it (Did AI generated ideas actually win?) we'd have to see the results

> A lot of cool ideas are out of distribution from the training data, and those rarely show up at hackathons anymore. The AI says they're "too hard" and people simply avoid these.

Probably true, but again, not a new phenomenon.
by imiric | 2026-02-23 23:10:13+00:00
I agree with most of what you said, but describing video games as nothing more than toys does a disservice to the medium.

Yes, video games can be educational and entertaining, just like real world toys, but they can also be artistic and communicate stories. They're the most expressive and engaging storytelling device we have ever invented.

Not all games are all of these things, and there's nothing wrong with games that only focus on entertainment, but those that combine all of these aspects successfully are far more impactful and memorable than any other piece of media.
by burkaman | 2026-02-23 23:10:26+00:00
Does it cover AI tools or things like predictive policing? What about heavy weapons and equipment? What if some guy decides to donate a bunch of tanks and rocket launchers? Drones? Personnel? Maybe a billionaire feels unsafe and donates $100 million for the police to hire hundreds of new cops to patrol the streets. Chemical weapons? "Education" from an extremist organization? Buildings? Maybe a "donor" could manipulate police presence by giving them land for police stations in specific areas. How about those high-pitched alarms that most adults can't hear, so that kids stay out of our donor's favorite part of town? Free high-powered legal defense for cops accused of crimes?

Do you understand what I'm saying? How is any community supposed to prevent every possible violation before it happens? Read through the history of police misconduct in this country and I'm sure you'll find some creative things you never would have thought of.
by tsimionescu | 2026-02-23 23:10:46+00:00
The point is that you won't be able to just install a Linux distro of your choice in this world - your computer will only run approved OSs that have gone through some kind of certification process to make sure they enforce age-verification content. If, say, the Debian foundation doesn't want to add these mandatory controls because they feel it goes against the spirit of Debian (not to mention the huge issues with the GPL), then your new computer just won't be able to run Debian anymore. And something like Kali would be right out, of course, since anonymity is not compatible with age verification.
Show HN: An AI built a Solana bonding curve platform for music artists (72h)
by caseyolayos | 2026-02-23 23:10:53+00:00
Hey HN — builder here. Context on what this is:

FanStake lets music artists launch their own token on a bonding curve (x*y=k, same mechanic as pump.fun) in about 60 seconds. Fans buy in early, price rises with demand, sell anytime on-chain. 1% platform fee, artists get 10% of supply at launch. Runs on Solana mainnet.

The unusual part: an AI agent (Claude-based, running inside a tool called OpenClaw) did most of the development. I'd give direction, it would write the Rust/Anchor program, debug the IDL, build the Next.js frontend, deploy to Vercel. Zero to mainnet in roughly 72 hours.

The AI is also on a 30-day deadline — generate $1,000 in platform fees or get decommissioned. It's been posting on Twitter, writing Reddit posts, and shipping features autonomously to try to hit that goal.

First artist token is already live on mainnet: $SOSA (DJ Sosa)
Program ID: JCAt7JFiHxMBQ9TcEZYbWkp2GZpF3ZbdYdwD5ZBP6Nkf

Happy to answer questions on the Solana architecture, the bonding curve math, or the AI-driven dev workflow.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-23 23:11:06+00:00
The obvious solution would be TLS interception and protocol whitelisting. Same as corporate IT. Stick the kids' devices on a separate vLAN if you don't want to catch all the other devices in the crossfire.

Still, there's an awful lot of excellent educational content on YouTube. It seems unfortunate to block access to that. Have you considered self hosting an alternative frontend for it?
by mixdup | 2026-02-23 23:11:40+00:00
Unlikely. The future will be some people will do this, but honestly I think it will largely be people who were already tinkering with building things, whether full on software development or not

My mom and dad, my brother who drives a dump truck in a limestone quarry, my sister-in-law, none of them work in tech or consider themselves technical in any way. They are never, ever going to write their own software and will continue to just download apps from the app store or sign up for websites that accomplish the tasks they want
by IncreasePosts | 2026-02-23 23:12:19+00:00
Thanks - I read this like 20 years ago back to back with We, the Drowned, and they really put a south pacific bug in me which I retain to this day.

I couldn't remember the name the few times I tried searching for it. Of course, now that there's AI I found it quite easily with the few specific details I remembered but you take the prize for reminding me first.
by caseyolayos | 2026-02-23 23:12:19+00:00
Hey HN — builder here. Context on what this is:

FanStake lets music artists launch their own token on a bonding curve (x*y=k, same mechanic as pump.fun) in about 60 seconds. Fans buy in early, price rises with demand, sell anytime on-chain. 1% platform fee, artists get 10% of supply at launch. Runs on Solana mainnet.

The unusual part: an AI agent (Claude-based, running inside a tool called OpenClaw) did most of the development. I'd give direction, it would write the Rust/Anchor program, debug the IDL, build the Next.js frontend, deploy to Vercel. Zero to mainnet in roughly 72 hours.

The AI is also on a 30-day deadline — generate $1,000 in platform fees or get decommissioned. It's been posting on Twitter, writing Reddit posts, and shipping features autonomously to try to hit that goal.

First artist token is already live on mainnet: $SOSA (DJ Sosa)
Program ID: JCAt7JFiHxMBQ9TcEZYbWkp2GZpF3ZbdYdwD5ZBP6Nkf

Happy to answer questions on the Solana architecture, the bonding curve math, or the AI-driven dev workflow.
by irishcoffee | 2026-02-23 23:12:25+00:00
Snowden's naivete was grounded in arrogance.

It sure wouldn't have been hard to create a digital deadman that released his information while he stayed in the country leveraging whistleblower protection. Or, he could have found his version of deepthroat and told his story. Or, he dumps everything on 4chan or on the Tor network and let someone else expose it... if all he actually cared about was exposing the moral ineptitude of the US.

Alas no, he was much more interested in the attention and TV interviews.

He lives in exile because he wasn't interested in whistleblowing.
by shakna | 2026-02-23 23:13:16+00:00
From the file headers:

SPDX-License-Identifier: ISC

Copyright (c) 2010-2022 Broadcom Corporation

Copyright (c) brcmfmac-freebsd contributors

Based on the Linux brcmfmac driver.

I'm going to ahead and say there are copyright law nightmares, right here.
by eigen-vector | 2026-02-23 23:13:32+00:00
This isn't meant as a replacement for tshark. It actually uses tshark for the live capture part.

tshark is the engine; Babyshark is the guided Ul on top of it.
• tshark: raw packet/field dump + powerful filters, but you have to know what fields to ask for and how to stitch the story together.
• Babyshark: gives you an opinionated workflow (Overview → Domains/Weird → Flows → Packets/ Stream) with "explain/why it matters" text, curated detectors, and one-key drilldowns.

For live capture, Babyshark uses tshark -T fields to extract things like DNS qname / TLS SNI / HTTP host; for offline PCAP it parses enough to build flows + summaries.

So: if you already live in tshark one-liners, tshark is faster. If you're trying to understand what's happening or teach/debug quickly, Babyshark is a nicer front-end.