MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PurpleRamen | 2026-02-18 10:08:35+00:00
> Payments? it's one single payment to one winner

How do you know? They can tell everyone they've won and snack their data. It's not a verifiable public contest.

> Also, how is it more data than when you buy a coffee?

Coffee-shop has no other personal data and is usually using other payment-methods. But still, there have been cases of misusage.

> but I think for most people the value of a single unit of "their data" is near $0.00.

This is a classical scenario for social engineering, and we are in a high profile social group here. There is a good chance that someone from a big company is participating here. This is not about stealing some peanuts or selling a handful or data on the darknet. It's about collecting personal data and scouting potential victims for a future attacks.

And I'm not saying this is an actual case happening here, but to not even see the problem is..interessting.
by haizzz | 2026-02-18 10:08:55+00:00
Hey HN, we built Bulwark (https://getbulwark.ai) because the current permission model for coding agents doesn't scale. Having to constantly check back in to approve or reject commands defeats the purpose. One agent, one terminal, one human watching is fine, but to get the most out of these agents, we need to run multiple sessions across laptops, servers, and cloud dev environments with the same permission set.

Bulwark is a centralized permission layer for coding agents. Define a single set of policies that are enforced across all sessions and devices, approve uncommon commands from a single dashboard with a full audit trail. Let your agents run at full speed and be confident that they won't wreak havoc on your machines and integrations!

Works with Claude Code and Amp now, with more integrations coming.
by storus | 2026-02-18 10:09:18+00:00
It will lead to hollowing out of the substance everywhere. The constant march to more abstraction and simplicity will inevitably end up with AI doing all the work and nobody understanding what is going on underneath, turning technology into magic again. We have seen people losing touch with how things work with every single move towards abstraction, machine code -> C -> Java -> JavaScript -> async/await -> ... -> LLM code generation, producing generations of devs that are more and more detached from the metal and living in a vastly simplified landscape not understanding trade-offs of the abstractions they are using, which leads to some unsolvable problems in production that inevitably arise due to the choices made for them by the abstractions.
by srean | 2026-02-18 10:09:30+00:00
> Unfortunately, my previous GitHub account got flagged/shadowbanned

Oh! That sucks big time. Hope you had a local repo of everything.

BTW I don't think your tone is formal, just suspiciously congratulatory and polite :)

Do checkout Felix when you get time. It has done a lot with coroutines. You were asking about scheduling, it allows you to create more schedulers within the language.
by Underqualified | 2026-02-18 10:09:45+00:00
This is my feeling about both IT and AI. It enables companies to do a lot of things which don't really bring value.
One of the biggest use case for AI in the company I work for now is powerBI report generation. Fine, but a couple of years ago we didn't even have all these graphs and reports. I'm not sure they bring actual value, since I see decisions still being made mostly on intuition.
by ivan_gammel | 2026-02-18 10:10:05+00:00
A few days ago Ukraine knocked out central heating infrastructure in Belgorod, a regional capital with 350k people, which is unlikely to be repaired until spring. Two civilians repairing it from previous strikes were killed. Whether this is rare or not, it doesn’t change anything about what I said about changing character of the war: both sides largely gave up on trying to win on the battlefield and now attack energy infrastructure of each other, putting pressure on civilian population.
by qalmakka | 2026-02-18 10:10:38+00:00
I think that's because not everyone does the same job within the same stack and constraints. I'm yet to find an LLM that writes the kind of C++ I dabble with without having to manually tweak it myself (or that truly understands our codebase). Conversely, I find that LLMs are now excellent at python and orchestration tasks for instance. It's very situational
by LoveMortuus | 2026-02-18 10:11:06+00:00
I don't mind AI, but one of the issues that I have noticed when using it, is that I can't ask you questions about how you built the project and how you overcame difficulties and much more importantly what you've learned from it so that those that follow can stand on the shoulders of giants.

I feel that actual 'understanding' is still incredibly important and it'll probably always be important. I'm talking about people actually understanding what's happening and why it's happening.

The main difference I've noticed when I built stuff with AI and without it, is that without it I understood and knew the code much more intimately, as the program was running, I could approximate with a fairly good degree of precision where in the code the program was at a given time - human based debugging.

When I'm using AI to build stuff all of this is gone. It's very little different from just opening a random Git repo, basically foreign code to me.

There are tasks that just need to be done, and then there are tasks one outta think about.
by tranq_cassowary | 2026-02-18 10:11:21+00:00
x86 virtualization isn't perfect at all

QubesOS certainly has some good things going for it with isolation but the guest VMs which run traditional desktop OSes are generally much less secure than mobile OSes like Android OSes and iOS

Iirc it's not even possible to run QubesOS on hardware that has proper verified boot or non-meaningless secureboot.

With regards to security through obscurity, the Pixel firmware isn't obfuscated at all. It's closed source but it's easy to decompile the code and inspect it. They don't try to obfuscate it to make that difficult.
by zelphirkalt | 2026-02-18 10:12:01+00:00
Meetings can be work, but often they are a waste of time. Often they are only done, because the company has not found a better way to structure itself, which is also accepted by the management lawyer, who often has a profound fear of loss of control and likes to micromanage. If you can zone out for most of the meeting, and not experience negative effects from that, then the meeting was a waste of your time.
by nicbou | 2026-02-18 10:12:07+00:00
> Is there even a goal here beyond "generating content"?

This is the part that hurts. It's all so pointless, so perfunctory. A web of incentives run amok. Systems too slick to stop moving. Is this what living inside the paperclip maximizer feels like?

Words we didn't write, thoughts we didn't have, for engagement, for a media presence, for an audience you can peddle yourself to when your bullshit job gets automated. All of that technology, all those resources, and we use it to drown humanity in noise.
by XenophileJKO | 2026-02-18 10:12:07+00:00
If you know good architecture and you are testing as you go, I would say, it is probably pretty damn close to being able to build a company without looking at the code. Not without "risk" but definitely doable and plausible.

My current project that I started this weekend is a rust client server game with the client compiled into web assembly.

I do these projects without reading the code at all as a way to gauge what I can possibly do with AI without reading code, purely operating as a PM with technical intuition and architectural opinions.

So far Opus 4.6 has been capable of building it all out. I have to catch issues and I have asked it for refactoring analysis to see if it could optimize the file structure/components, but I haven't read the code at all.

At work I certainly read all the code. But would recommend people try to build something non trivial without looking at the code. It does take skill though, so maybe start small and build up the intuition on how they have issues, etc. I think you'll be surprised how much your technical intuition can scale even when you are not looking at the code.
by DrewADesign | 2026-02-18 10:12:12+00:00
I’m not talking about the health of the the industry— I’m talking about the fallout for employees, anyone with any stake in the stock market, etc. A whole lot of retail investors, 401k holders, etc. got fucked, and a whole lot of other people lost their jobs. Careers were stunted. This was before we had preexisting condition protection so for people with cancer or other serious chronic health conditions, losing a job could be a death sentence, even if they got another job the very next day. The housing market got screwed up.

From the big short (and a bunch of introductory macroeconomics classes:)

"For every 1% that unemployment rises, 40,000 people die."

There are consequences to people running big companies like they’re playing poker.
by TheDong | 2026-02-18 10:12:30+00:00
> why buy Windows and Office when I can just ask claude to write me my own versions instead? Why run a commodity operating system on kiosks?

Linux costs $0. Creating a linux clone compatible with your hardware from the hardware spec sheets with an AI for complicated hardware would cost thousands to millions of dollars in tokens, and you'd end up with something that works worse than linux (or more likely something that doesn't even boot).

Even if the price falls by a thousand fold, why would you spend thousands of dollars on tokens to develop an OS when there's already one you can use?

Even if software becomes cheaper to write, it's not free, and there's a lot of software (especially libraries) out there which is free.
by IshKebab | 2026-02-18 10:13:28+00:00
> someone who hasn't worked on both the aspects for a non-trivial industry project

I have.

When I say software I mean e.g. proficient C++/Rust developers. There's absolutely no reason any of them would struggle with silicon design. Yet silicon designers treat it as if it's some fundamentally different skill, like the difference between playing a piano and a trombone, rather than something more like the difference between programming GPUs and CPUs.
by willx86 | 2026-02-18 10:13:30+00:00
Looks pretty cool I've wanted something similar many times

Quick question, why this style?

opts := toil.Options{}. WithWorkers(4). // Use 4 workers (default: number of CPU cores) StopOnError(true)

Most golang uses:
toil.Options{Workers: 4} etc etc?

Bar that I look forward to using it!
by birdsongs | 2026-02-18 10:14:26+00:00
> LLM's are notoriously bad at this. The noise to signal ratio is unacceptably high

I could go either way on the future of this, but if you take the argument that we're still early days, this may not hold. They're notoriously bad at this so far.

We could still be in the PC DOS 3.X era in this timeline. Wait until we hit the Windows 3.1, or 95 equivalent. Personally, I have seen shocking improvements in the past 3 months with the latest models.
Show HN: A simple and fun leaderboard for game nights
by ip7e | 2026-02-18 10:15:44+00:00
Hey HN,

I built Shmelo as a little break from work stuff.

Its a simple leaderboard for games with friends: set it up fast, log games, share a public link.

Works with any game as long as it has winners and losers.

Rankings use elo system (like chess). it stays fair even if people miss a few sessions.
You can also see how rankings change over time, and tap into more stats if you want.

Feedback appreciated.

Cheers!
by concats | 2026-02-18 10:17:13+00:00
If we assume people are somewhat rational (big ask I know), and the Efficient-market hypothesis, then we can estimate the value created by AI to be roughly equal to the revenue of these AI companies. That is: A professional who pays 20€/month likely believes that the AI product provides them with roughly 20€ each month in productivity gains, or else they wouldn't be paying, and similarly they would pay more for a bigger subscription if they thought there was more low hanging fruit available to grab.

Of course this doesn't take into account people who just pay to play around and learn, non professional use cases, or a few other things, but it's a rough ballpark estimate.

Assuming the above, current AI models would only increase the productivity for most workplaces by a relatively small amount, around 10-200 € per employee per month perhaps. Almost indistinguishable compared to salaries and other business expenses.
by raffael_de | 2026-02-18 10:18:35+00:00
I have Lee Pace on the radar since Singh's The Fall.

Your assessment of movie magic is only partially correct. Obviously, a character has to be convincing by himself but the heavy lifting of the illusion is done by the peer characters acting as if they believe the role he plays.

"The king is always played by the others"

Not sure who is to credit for this quote but in my opinion it is one of the most important insights to understand how movies work and also why movie characters are never relevant role models.
by Bishonen88 | 2026-02-18 10:19:45+00:00
> The interesting part isn't the app — it's the agent collaboration.

That isn't interesting. Who wants to read through LLMs arguing with each other? AI:DR.

I applaud the effort to get something to prod within hours but the quality of this is poor. The videos don't play (!). "Video can't be played because file is corrupt". The whole page has all the cliches of AI apps - gradients, emojis, fake 3d buttons like the navbar, purple everywhere, super-cringe footer "world's most advanced AI Agent workforce" etc.

Dunno what/who this is for.
by lixiasky | 2026-02-18 10:21:00+00:00
Haha, point taken! I will try to dial down the "customer service mode" :)
Re: GitHub: Yeah, thankfully I had the local git history, so the code was safe. Just lost the community interactions (stars/issues), which was a bummer.
Re: Felix: That sounds exactly like what I need. Being able to define custom schedulers within the language is pretty much the holy grail I'm chasing here. I'll put it on my reading list for tonight.
by mcny | 2026-02-18 10:21:00+00:00
That's not an achievement. Even a non intelligent low to mid end compact SUV such as a 2024 Mazda CX30 has cruise control that can detect cars stopped ahead to slow down, stop if necessary, and continue when the car in front starts moving.

I'm just saying that "it avoids a collision" by not ramming into people or cars is table stakes and it makes us look incompetent if we tout it as a flagship feature.
by rambambram | 2026-02-18 10:21:00+00:00
Microsoft is only doing something about this now because there's enough evidence for a lawsuit. I don't know about the US, but the author seems to be from The Netherlands. Correct me if I'm wrong (and I don't know the exact legal name for it now), but there's something like a right to not get 'distortion or mutilation of intellectual property'.

Microsoft just spits in this creator's face by mutilating his creation in a bad way.
by synctext | 2026-02-18 10:21:07+00:00
New info now online. Elon Musk has now confirmed it is about getting regulatory permission for solar panel deployment. These regulation stop deployment at scale. Its cheaper in the future in space (prediction: in 36 months).

He was asked directly during interview: is this a regulatory play?

https://youtu.be/BYXbuik3dgA?t=120
by ben_w | 2026-02-18 10:21:17+00:00
I'm semi-seriously expecting remote-work Optimus driving in the near future.

Well, more so than it already is.

A factory in the US* staffed entirely by humanoid robots has the same impact on US employment opportunities regardless of if the robots are controlled by AI in the sense of software or in case where the "Actually Indians" meme still applies.

It's just that in the latter case your "illegal aliens" who are "stealing our jobs" are managing to do so without actually crossing the border, making it very difficult to deport them, and denying them access suddenly becomes a freedom of speech issue.

* I'm in Europe, I don't think we'll be tolerating "new" "exciting" "opportunities" from Musk any time soon. I don't think China or Russia will be either. Or indeed more than half of the G20 nations. He'll be told to prove it, and get told "no" a lot because experiments based on his rhetoric and vision are no longer worth the downsides without solid proof both that it works as advertised and that he won't cut things off when he has a hissy fit.
by scotty79 | 2026-02-18 10:21:49+00:00
Aww hell no.

That's what I get on this address:

Diese Webseite ist aus urheberrechtlichen Gründen nicht verfügbar.
Zu den Hintergründen informieren Sie sich bitte hier.

Basically blocked for copyright reasons. And the 'hier' leads here:

https://cuii.info/ueber-uns/

I have less rights to access the information than LLMs have.

And they set up this dumb thing in 2021. Is this country evolving backwards?
by kykeonaut | 2026-02-18 10:22:23+00:00
> Those questions that it will no longer occur to you to ask (not just of the robot, but of yourself) might be the most pertinent ones!

That is true, but then again also with google. You could see why some people want to go back to the "read the book" era where you didn't have google to query anything and had to make the real questions.
by sunrunner | 2026-02-18 10:22:36+00:00
Something I call the 'Generate First, Review Never' approach, seemingly favoured by my colleagues, and which has the magical quality of increasing the overall amount of work done through an increased amount of time taken by N receivers of low-quality document having to review, understand and fact check said document.

See also: AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity [1]

[1] https://hbr.org/2025/09/ai-generated-workslop-is-destroying-...
by dns_snek | 2026-02-18 10:24:13+00:00
You've created a tautology: Socialism is bad because bad models are socialism and better models are not-socialism.

> You cannot point at it and say "hey, successful socialism"

Yes I can because ideological purity doesn't exist in the real world. All of our countries are a mix of capitalist and socialist ideas yet we call them "capitalist" because that's the current predominant organization.

> Tito was a mortal enemy of Stalin, stroke a balanced neither-East-nor-West, but fairly friendly to the West policy already in 1950, and his collectivization efforts were a fraction of what Marxist-Leninist doctrine demands.

You're making my point for me, Yugoslavia was completely different from USSR yet still socialist. Socialism is not synonymous with Marxist-Leninist doctrine. It's a fairly simple core idea that has an infinite number of possible implementations, one of them being market socialism with worker cooperatives.

Aside from that short period post-WW2, no socialist or communist nation has been allowed to exist without interference from the US through oppressive economic sanctions that would cripple and destroy any economy regardless of its economic system, but people love nothing more than to draw conclusions from these obviously-invalid "experiments".

"You" (and I mean the collective you) are essentially hijacking the word "socialism" to simply mean "everything that was bad about the USSR". The system has been teaching and conditioning people to do that for decades, but we should really be more conscious and stop doing that.
by GSiesto | 2026-02-18 10:25:22+00:00
Hey HN,

I built PDFLince because I was against uploading personal documents (like bank statements) to random servers just to merge pdfs, reorder, divide, convert from/to images etc.

Everything runs 100% client side. All logic runs in your browser using pdf-lib and Web Workers.

It has zero server uploads so no file data ever leaves your device.
Works without internet once loaded.

The Tech:
- Built with Next.js 15 & TypeScript.
- Uses Web Workers to keep the UI responsive.
- Styled with Tailwind CSS.

Live Demo: https://pdflince.com/en

It's fully open source. I'd love to hear your feedback and features you'd like to see next
by vova_hn2 | 2026-02-18 10:25:28+00:00
I'm sorry, but I find this mentality from app developers extremely annoying.

I personally prefer light themes everywhere, both in IDEs and in the terminal. I thought that just choosing my own color scheme for 0-15 would give me the color pallette that I prefer, but because app developers like you for some reason decided that you know better what colors do I prefer, this is actually not enough. I also have to configure each TUI application separately to have the color scheme that I like.

And I do not understand why people do it. Like, why would you deliberately break the universal customization system and force users to use your own, specific to your app?

Honesty, each time I encounter an app that uses 16-255 colors, I feel like someone just violated my personal space and intruded into my chosen color pallette with their own colors that don't fit.
by ben_w | 2026-02-18 10:26:04+00:00
> I think these stories tickle the conspiracy theorist part of some people's brains and they want to believe it's true.

It's more than just that, there's also the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon, i.e. we talk about something and then notice it mysteriously suggested to us on YouTube or whatever. And then assume this was causal rather than coincidence.

I got that yesterday, though I can't even remember now what the video or the topic of discussion was.
by smallstepforman | 2026-02-18 10:26:10+00:00
Well, in the real world we need at least polymorphism and operator overloading, but that is against the core Zig philosophy, so serious GameDev ignores it (which ironically one would think is the biggest core market for low level systems programming). Hence why new GameDev development still chooses C++, and Andrew’s project fails to gain a significant boost in users.
by zygentoma | 2026-02-18 10:26:21+00:00
Well, you get the warning, but as long as HSTS is not active, you can still click on "Accept the risk and continue" …

[EDIT:] Just checked a bit closer, they are using an LetsEncrypt cert for "cuii.telefonica.de", which is obviously the wrong domain, but as I said above, as long as HSTS is not active for "annas-archive.li", you can still bypass via the button.
by kmaitreys | 2026-02-18 10:27:23+00:00
Can you explain the philosophy behind this? Why do this, what is the advantage? Genuinely asking, as I'm not a programmer by profession. I commit often irrespective of the state of the code (it may not even compile). I understand git commit as a snapshot system. I don't expect each commit to be pristine, working version.

Lot of people in this thread have argued for squashing but I don't see why one would do that for a personal project. In large scale open source or corporate projects I can imagine they would like to have clean commit histories but why for a personal project?
by iainmerrick | 2026-02-18 10:28:10+00:00
You’re right. I think what you’re describing is “trunk based development” and it’s much better.

Maybe I’m overly cynical but I think git-flow was popular largely because of the catchy name and catchy diagram. When you point out that it has some redundant or counter-productive parts, people push back: “it’s a successful model! It’s standard! What makes you think you can do better?”

There’s a nice write-up of the trunk-based style at https://trunkbaseddevelopment.com/ that you can point to as something better.
by patrickk | 2026-02-18 10:28:18+00:00
> The solution is to get rid of all the people who write and process reports and empower the people who actually produce stuff to do it better.

That’s the solution if you’re the business owner.

That’s definitely not the solution if you’re a manager in charge of this useless activity, in fact, you should increase the amount of reports being written as much as humanly possible. The more underlings under you= more power and prestige.

This is the principal-agent problem writ large. As the comment mentioned above, also see Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs essay and book.