MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jfengel | 2026-02-25 15:24:23+00:00
To defeat an authoritarian project, people — in courts, legislatures, the military, business, civil society, and the mass public — must choose to fight rather than collaborate in democratic decline or ignore it altogether.

I feel like we can stop right there. In this most recent election, the purported authoritarian won a straight majority of votes. He's lost support since then, but even so, he has a very large base of support.

The article suggests that the threat has to be "obvious". Tens of millions of Americans dismiss the threat entirely.

I suspect that a lot of his partisans wouldn't support a clear violation of the two-term limit, but consider the precedent of Putin, who installed a proxy. Suppose that Trump decided to run for Congress; is there any doubt that he'd win, and be made Speaker? Or get himself made Chief Justice?
by falsework | 2026-02-25 15:25:19+00:00
I've been living inside this question for nine months. I own a food manufacturing business and a wine import company — no CS background. I built a structural analysis engine through AI collaboration that keeps producing findings I didn't anticipate and am still processing.

The constraint boundary finding — that the greatest works cluster where they are most consistently constrained, not where constraints are broken — emerged from the system. I didn't build it in.

Your framing assumes the question is what humans contribute when AI can ideate. My experience suggests a different question: what becomes possible when human structural intuition and AI pattern recognition operate together that neither produces alone? The output isn't AI ideation or human ideation. It's something without a clean precedent.

falsework.dev
by wongarsu | 2026-02-25 15:25:55+00:00
Confidence that in the short term nothing will change. All large-scale change is hard. Change that impacts everyone's workflow will be resisted even if the new thing is better, and in many areas the alternatives are pretty mediocre. Also a combination of political and economic pressure has in the past been successful in making meaningful initiatives fail or roll them back.

In the long term this is an issue. But I'm not sure the US stock market actually cares that much about what the world will look like in 4 or 8 years.
by rtsam | 2026-02-25 15:26:18+00:00
I always wonder what the settlement and damages would be if google marked Amazon as a phishing site for even a few minutes.

The problem is that these gatekeepers of the internet respond to false statements of facts/opinions by so called professionals.

I had cloudflare mark a worker as phishing because a AI "security company" thought my 301 redirect to their clients website was somehow malicious. (url redirects are normal affiliate things)

If the professionals don't understand the difference and cloudflare and google blindly block things, this is scary.
by tristan957 | 2026-02-25 15:26:38+00:00
> There's really nothing good, from a technical perspective, when something is enlarged 1000x the requirement. If you look at the code for sysvinit, it's maybe 10k lines. Systemd is > 1M lines of code, likely approaching 1.5M by now. So I suppose, 100x the size.

The systemd repo is a mono repo for other tools in addition to the init system.

I've heard from many sysadmins and distribution maintainers that systemd has been amazing. We went from ad hoc shell scripts to declarative plain text files. I think that's a huge win.
by Thanemate | 2026-02-25 15:26:43+00:00
I would replace "funding" with at minimum "contributing", because there are people who would think having a government actively dipping their toes in a product gives them right over actively piloting the direction of that product.

I've already seen online discussions of something similar happening when Valve announced that they're actively contributing to Arch Linux and KDE. But then, it's Valve.
by WarmWash | 2026-02-25 15:27:21+00:00
Just a heads up, since no company is pro-consumer, and I assume you know what it is to be pro-consumer, if you started a truly pro-consumer business, you would put all the others out of business.

Just think about that.

Ironically, a large part of Amazon's rise was on the back of their very pro-consumer policies. Not many companies would tolerate large scale GPU return fraud (among other items) for those many years for example.
by Brajeshwar | 2026-02-25 15:27:24+00:00
If this is to replace Alfred (the replacement for Quicksilver), you need to list the details of all features. Currently, the website looks too polished, as if the demo is “too good to be true.”

I started teaching my daughters to use Alfred because my multiple attempts at staying native with Spotlight has failed despite its recent advancements.

https://brajeshwar.com/2026/alfred/
by rexpop | 2026-02-25 15:27:28+00:00
Netanyahu is very clearly on the record supporting and defending a policy of allowing Qatari money into Hamas‑run Gaza, including publicly defending those payments to his own party as a way to keep Hamas and the PA separated.

There is real evidence that Israeli authorities helped the Islamist network that later became Hamas to grow and organize, but not good evidence that Israel secretly “founded” Hamas in the sense of designing or controlling the group. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Israel allowed and at times supported Sheikh Ahmed Yassin’s Islamist charity Mujama al‑Islamiya in Gaza (the Muslim Brotherhood–linked precursor to Hamas), seeing it as a useful counterweight to the secular PLO. eg From 1967 to 1987, the number of mosques in Gaza reportedly tripled, with Mujama heavily involved and benefiting from Israeli recognition and Gulf funding; Israeli officials hoped Islamist forces would weaken leftist, PLO‑aligned groups.

Scholars and former officials describe this as “blowback”: Israel strengthened the Brotherhood‑type infrastructure, which then reorganized itself into Hamas and turned violently against Israel.

There is no credible evidence that Israeli intelligence drew up Hamas’s founding charter, appointed its leaders, or covertly directed its formation in 1987; the group was an initiative of Palestinian Islamists tied to the Muslim Brotherhood.

To reiterate: Israel did not secretly found Hamas, but it surreptitiously facilitated the growth of its Islamist precursor networks and tolerated them for strategic reasons, and several former Israeli officials now openly say that this policy helped “create” Hamas in hindsight.
by rob | 2026-02-25 15:28:37+00:00
I would have hoped for them to at least support the "/clear" command or some form of it, especially to manage context if we're limited to a single session between the terminal and Claude iOS app. I like to work on things one at a time and /clear my way between them to get back to 0% context, which seems impossible with the current setup here?

Typing "/clear" in the terminal clears it, but the Claude iOS app just outputs raw XML instead and doesn't actually do anything:

<command-name>/clear</command-name>
<command-message>clear</command-message>
<command-args></command-args>

<local-command-stdout></local-command-stdout>
by KronisLV | 2026-02-25 15:29:01+00:00
Ehh, I think it's hardly different from the people who leave Claude Code working on problems overnight with really loose permissions - seemingly the chance of them returning to it mining crypto for Putin is low enough for it to not be a consideration (see the whole OpenClaw movement).

And people have been remoting into their machines for a while, so now having a pretty-UI-but-walled-garden variety doesn't ring that many alarm bells. If they manage to get it right, it wouldn't be that much different from running some CI stuff on your machine while you're making tea, or reviewing pull requests while lounging around.
by saghm | 2026-02-25 15:29:20+00:00
Also not a lawyer, but that makes intuitive sense. If I say "that food tastes bad", it's phrased as a fact, but a "reasonable person" (which is in fact a legal test used for some things, although I admit I'm not sure about libel) knows that there's an implicit "...to me" qualifier because the concept of taste itself is inherently subjective. My instinct is that while there are some things everyone would agree on as unsafe, it pretty quickly turns into a judgment call, and it probably makes sense to allow even ill-informed opinions that are made in good faith rather than malice or negligence. The question then becomes whether there's sufficient evidence to conclude something like that, and while the bar is lower for a libel claim than something criminal, it's still not obvious this would be provable here.
by dataking | 2026-02-25 15:29:25+00:00
> In 1997, ASML began studying a shift to using extreme ultraviolet and in 1999 joined a consortium, including Intel and two other U.S. chipmakers, in order to exploit fundamental research conducted by the US Department of Energy. Because the Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) it operates under is funded by the US government, licensing must be approved by Congress.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASML_Holding
by akgitrepos | 2026-02-25 15:29:27+00:00
Built a small regex engine in Rust and would love feedback from people who’ve implemented/search-optimized regex before.

- Thompson NFA core (no recursive backtracking engine)
- Bounded lazy transition cache for repeated scans
- v1 supports: literals, ., concat, |, * + ?, grouping, classes/ranges, \d \w \s \t \n, ^ $
- APIs: compile, is_match, find_first, find_all
- Contract-style conformance tests + microbenchmarks included

Repo: https://github.com/akgitrepos/regex-engine-rust

Curious where you’d take it next: captures first, Unicode semantics, or deeper DFA optimization?
by eulercoder | 2026-02-25 15:29:36+00:00
Hey HN, I'm Vikesh, founder of TexAu. Happy to answer anything.

A few things the post doesn't cover that might be useful context:

What we got wrong with V1 and V2. We built a browser automation tool that depended entirely on platforms we didn't control. That's an obvious mistake in hindsight, but at the time, every company in our space was doing the same thing. The C&Ds were inevitable. We just didn't want to see it.

Why we chose a spreadsheet interface for V3. We tested three approaches: a workflow builder (what V2 was), a dashboard UI, and a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet won because our users already think in rows and columns. Every agency we talked to was exporting CSVs from 4 different tools and joining them manually in Google Sheets. We realized the spreadsheet IS the workflow, not a step in one.

*Where we are financially*. 25 people, bootstrapped, no VC. We've been close to zero runway multiple times. V3 is live with paying customers but we're early. I won't pretend otherwise.

*What I'd love HN's input on*. We're building waterfall enrichment across multiple data providers with stop-on-success logic and AI columns that run LLM calls per row. If anyone here has dealt with similar orchestration problems at scale (provider failover, cost optimization across APIs, batching LLM calls), I'd genuinely love to hear how you approached it.

Ask me anything about the legal battles, the tech, building B2B from India without venture money, or where we screwed up.
by amluto | 2026-02-25 15:29:58+00:00
I’ve encountered this one:

https://github.com/containers/buildah/issues/6460

Also, there’s Podman’s decision to drop CNI support. Sure, I get that they want to support the full stack, but netavark is really not especially capable, and CNI allows all kinds of interesting (and frequently overcomplicated) things.
by enha | 2026-02-25 15:30:31+00:00
Hi HN,

Most AI coding agents fail not because they lack coding ability, but because they lack context. After months of hitting a wall with Cursor and Bolt, I realized a 1-sentence prompt is the fastest way to get trapped in a "bug-fixing loop."

The missing link isn't better AI—it’s Technical Grammar.

I built https://ideaforge.chat to shift the workflow from "prompting" to "specification forging."

What’s different about this approach?

Adaptive Interviewing: Instead of a static template, the AI acts as a PM/Technical Co-founder that grills you on logic gaps you didn't know existed.

Forcing Technical Decisions: It won't let you start coding until you've defined things like data relationships, session persistence, and edge cases.

Machine-Readable Specs: The output is a structured Markdown document specifically formatted to maximize the performance of coding agents like Cursor or Windsurf.

I’ve moved from "broken apps on the first try" to "MVPs that actually work" by using this interview-first method.

To the engineers: Is the "Specification Gap" something you see as the primary bottleneck for non-technical partners? I’d love your feedback on whether this Socratic approach produces the kind of PRD you’d actually find useful for a high-stakes project.
by petterroea | 2026-02-25 15:30:39+00:00
Side note: My empirical experience is that vanity domains are disliked by some enterprise security systems. I have a friend who owns a .homes domain which ended up being blocked by quad9 as well as the enterprise security system of a friend's work for ~half a year. The block cleared by itself.

I had the same experience while buying another TLD. For ~1 month, certain people whose ISP "helpfully" had "safe browsing" features, simply blocked us outright. For being new and different.

The learning for me was that new domains are no longer trusted, and seemingly some vanity domains get even more strict treatment.
by eszed | 2026-02-25 15:30:45+00:00
Oh, geeze. The progressive transparency effect on the words towards the "obscure" end of their spectrum made the later pages impossible for me to read.

I suspect the entire list was produced by an AI entity which had not been prompted to avoid giving offense. I predict a range of (tedious) opinions about whether a prohibition on that particular word is an appropriate inclusion in a system prompt.

That's also not a term I've - thankfully! - ever heard, so I've no idea if it's hallucinated. This is not an invitation, HN, to define or explain it to me.
by hamdingers | 2026-02-25 15:30:56+00:00
The words in your link do not support the words in your comment. Don't be snarky unless you are certain you're correct.

> a plaintiff must show four things: 1) a false statement purporting to be fact; 2) publication or communication of that statement to a third person; 3) fault amounting to at least negligence; and 4) damages, or some harm caused to the reputation of the person or entity who is the subject of the statement.

They falsely marked the site unsafe[1] on a published list[2], the results weren't checked and couldn't be appealed[3] and OPs site was taken down[4].
by ProllyInfamous | 2026-02-25 15:30:56+00:00
I'm currently reading Cormack McCarthy's Suttree (my first of his novels) — just an exceptional polymath capable of painting complicated scenery with words dozenly scattered throughout paragraphs [0].

My favorite adjective he's coördinated is "burntwing", used to describe moths spiraling downwards after passing through candleflames. If I had crafted such a descriptive contraction, my former styling would've been "burnt-wing", had I even been capable of generating such concise imagery [1].

McCarthy's stylings have helped me to reduce hyphenations in my own writings — reducing their usage mainly to contractedwords which might be all-too-confusing without them.

[0] pg104 has ten words that I do not know their definitions, yet through context they work to advance the storyline of character racists (book is set in 1950s).

[1] decades ago, during college burnout, I was searching for the essense of "burntwing" — reduced to writing a professor about "feeling like a burning airplane in tailspin." My trajectory back then was definitely burntwing.
by lproven | 2026-02-25 15:31:04+00:00
> was its own distinct upgrade path

"Would have been", surely? It never existed, did it? The Geneve shipped.

MESS is one thing. I am interested in something the size of a RasPi I can connect to a screen.

Think of something like this:

https://github.com/DonSuperfo/Xberry-Pi
by leonfresh | 2026-02-25 15:31:05+00:00
Amazing, thanks for the great feedback :) I'll add it to the reviews!

Yeah I find the estimate of the radar chart to be quite accurate. I scanned a range of players from beginners, to pros like magnus and hikaru and myself who is in between (2200 elo) and it gets the rating estimates correct. So I think if we work on all the fields it's suggesting we can definitely climb!
by dec0dedab0de | 2026-02-25 15:31:48+00:00
i like it, but I think i would rather have a proxy, or atleast an auth redirect to those different tools.

I used to have flower at myapp.com/flower using an auth redirect in nginx to a simple view in django that made sure it was an admin user. I think if you can make that setup easier to leverage existing tools that would be nicer than rebuilding everything.
by petcat | 2026-02-25 15:32:00+00:00
> retaliate by withholding ASML’s tech

The problem is that the core technology that makes ASML's tech valuable is the EUV light source which is entirely designed, developed, and manufactured by Cymer in California, which is a US company that ASML acquired in 2013. That acquisition was permitted only under strict technology sharing and export-control agreements.

I have no doubt that this administration would forcefully "take back" Cymer if the EU tried to restrict access to ASML lithography machines. They would force a sale back to US ownership, TikTok-style.
by agenticfish | 2026-02-25 15:32:07+00:00
Maybe I misunderstood the use case this is for, but I asked it to search for a "venue for team outing for 8 people in the City of London" and it just came up with random hotels in London. I clarified that I'm looking for venues for a team activity and that it needs to be limited to the City, but it just returned hotels again.
by kakkun | 2026-02-25 15:32:16+00:00
Nice!

Here's my version of a kindle dashboard I set up several months ago (https://github.com/thekakkun/kiiin). I use it to show local weather data and music data from my media server.

As for the "color bleed" (I assume it's ghosting) you mention, periodically using `eips -f` when drawing the image to force a full screen redraw should help.
by AndrewKemendo | 2026-02-25 15:32:25+00:00
I was the author for the practitioners implementation section for the IEEE 7010 standard for assessing human impact from AI software

https://standards.ieee.org/ieee/7010/7718/

I also worked closely with Jack Clark at OpenAI before he disappeared on all these issues as CTO back in 2018

There are literally zero “AI labs” that have ever cared about “safety”

none of them have ever done anything tangible with any kind of independent auditable third-party way that has some defined reference baseline for what is safe and what is not, how to evaluate it, or a practitioners guidance for how to determine what it is and what is not safe as a designer.

They follow the same rules as every other technology platform: do as much as you can legally get away with no more no less

I say this as somebody who’s been actively involved in the AI “safety” debate for a long time now at least since 2013

The concept itself doesn’t even make sense if you fully understand the intersectional scope of technology and society

Societies demands are the things that are unsafe not the technologies themselves

Just like Bertrand Russell said “as long as war exists all technologies will be utilized for it” - you can replace “war” for anything that you think is unsafe
by TZubiri | 2026-02-25 15:32:30+00:00
I think in this case it's more of a critique than an accolade. If something that isn't supposed to be a programming language is turing-complete/can run doom, then it means, then it means that it has bloated and some features are too complex for the domain specific functionality.

At some point, these tools solve a specific problem not by actually solving it within its constraints, but by implementing a programming language.

E.g:

First act:Dev makes a tool to schedule calendars, clients are happy.

Second act: client asks for capacity to send mail, dev includes capacity to send mail, another client asks for capacity to send texts, dev adds capacity to send texts

third act: client asks for capacity to send slack messages, dev is tired of these custom requests and thus embeds a configurable language with ifs and thens that allows the clients to connect its calendar tool with whatever messaging platform or with whatever they want.

Boom X calendar tool is turing complete, it's not a compliment, it's a failure mode.
by bayindirh | 2026-02-25 15:32:30+00:00
> We went from ad hoc shell scripts to declarative plain text files. I think that's a huge win.

Current sysadmin and former distro maintainer here, who respectfully disagrees with you and your friends.

Many, if not all software packages followed a well-defined SYS-V service file stub, esp. after so-called "Parallel SYS-V". We were able to order services, define dependencies and deterministically boot systems at the speed of light. Nothing broke, and the systems fully supported "pull the plug if you want, it won't break" promise.

While I don't hate systemd, I don't like its many ways. It's something like X11 before auto-configuring support for me. The less I touch it, less grumpy I am. Technical parts aside, remembering the ugliness surrounding it (people, ecosystem and predatory aspects) makes me really angry sometimes.

Tip: Research "Amutable" and what they are up to.
by eks391 | 2026-02-25 15:32:58+00:00
I don't have a cool story about sending a letter as a kid, although I had drafted one to send to Lego, but have been on the receiving end before. My office is across the street from an elementary school that we have a relationship with, evidenced by the annual trick or treat we host for them. One day roughly every third cubicle or so had a letter at the desk from one of the kids with a cute note. It was clear that our leadership provided the names and we weren't looked up, because mine had my nickname. Anyway, even though it was clearly a class assignment, it was really neat, and I made a reply with official company letterhead and everything in hopes of making the day of the kid who wrote me. Turns out that other peers had the same idea, because when I went to leadership to ask how to return it to the kid (I didn't know his classroom or anything. Just a first name and school address), they had letters from several other employees that they were going to return to the school.
by chasd00 | 2026-02-25 15:33:11+00:00
"safe" is such a subjective concept to begin with, have any of the model providers ever defined what they mean by "safe"?

It doesn't mean much to me if a safe model is one that does not output the recipe for mustard gas, that information is trivially available elsewhere.

Or, is a safe model one that doesn't come off as racist? Ok but i would classify that as unoffensive instead of safe but I admit definitions of words can be fluid and change.

Is a safe model one that refuses to produce code for a weapons system? Well.. does a PID controller count? I can use that to keep a gun pointed at a target or i can use that to prevent a baby rocker from falling over.

Maybe they're giving up on "safe" because there's no definitive way to know if a model is safe or not. I've always held the opinion that ai safety was more about brand safety. Maybe now the model providers can afford some bad press and it not be the death of their company.