MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by CGMthrowaway | 2026-02-17 17:49:36+00:00
Indeed. Mark Zuckerberg has long said the administration pressured Facebook to censor COVID-related content, including satire and humor. And now the administration has ended public funding for NPR and PBS. Chilling effect

It goes back even further, just see the 1941 FCC “Mayflower Decision” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayflower_doctrine
Ask HN: Hackers sequel, same cast, 30 years later
by herodoturtle | 2026-02-17 17:49:37+00:00
I suspect the odds are low of an official sequel being produced.

But with this latest wave of jaw-dropping AI video gen, I imagine it’s possible to make a sequel to Hackers, featuring the same cast 30 years on.

Plot ideas anyone?

Hack the planet <3
by fsflover | 2026-02-17 17:49:52+00:00
> until we free the proprietary baseband processors and their RTOS

How about Pinephone with its partially freed baseband OS [0] or Librem 5 with its removable modem [1]?

[0] https://github.com/the-modem-distro/pinephone_modem_sdk

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5
by WalterBright | 2026-02-17 17:50:09+00:00
Some people would say that murder is the worst crime, but I disagree. A murder done in anger, or to get revenge, or for money, or is otherwise a personal thing is one thing. But there are crimes against society - like the Boston bombers, and the school shooters, and the people who deliberately drive into crowds, or poison the water supply. Those disrupt society, and the cost of them goes far beyond the people killed.

Those criminals need to be in jail for life.
by wduquette | 2026-02-17 17:50:30+00:00
Sounds very cool. I've dabbled with Lisp on and off since the mid-80's, starting with a text adventure in LISP-80 on a Kaypro 4, and though I've never written a serious project in Lisp I've learned a great deal from it. (Wrote a lot of TCL code once upon a time; I've always thought of TCL as a Lisp in which you do a lot of things backwards.)
Show HN: gboy.ts: A gameboy emulator in TypeScript for the browser and server
by MaxLeiter | 2026-02-17 17:50:41+00:00
I've wanted to mess with variations of TwitchPlaysPokemon but on Bluesky and similar but couldn't find a DMG/gameboy emulator that fit my needs.

This runs in the browser, on the server, and on more limited environments like lambda and workers.

It supports dumping and loading save states, audio, and a debug CLI that lets you (or agents) use it from the terminal.

Without AI, this would have taken me days to make (I've tried in the past). With AI, it took a few hours, although I have experience with emulation and was able to guide the LLMs/impose judgement on some design decisions.
by the_harpia_io | 2026-02-17 17:51:09+00:00
the part nobody talks about is that this isn't just a productivity bottleneck - it's a security one. when your team doesn't deeply understand the codebase anymore because AI wrote most of it, code review becomes theater. I've watched PRs go through where the reviewer clearly didn't understand the auth flow well enough to notice the AI introduced a path that bypassed token validation. not malicious, just a plausible looking implementation that happened to be wrong in a way that matters.

the contracts argument above sounds nice in theory but in practice most codebases don't have well defined contracts for anything security sensitive. they have implicit assumptions that only make sense if you've been in the code long enough to absorb them. AI doesn't absorb those, it pattern matches around them. and if the humans reviewing the AI output also don't have that context anymore then honestly who's catching these things
by dang | 2026-02-17 17:51:51+00:00
No one told me to ban your account, and I have no interest in and do not track your views on Peter Thiel.

We've asked you repeatedly to stop breaking the site guidelines and explained to you more than once that using the site primarily for political or ideological battle is against the rules. You've continued to post lots of flamewar comments and even many of the non-political ones have been unsubstantive and either snarky or aggressive. That's a lot of poison added to the ecosystem. When I saw you getting aggressive with that other user yesterday, for me it was the last straw and I banned your account. (The other user also, of course, but whether your account was breaking the rules has nothing to do with that someone else was doing.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43755154 (April 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43142554 (Feb 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35605974 (April 2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27397254 (June 2021)

You've listed a lot of other grievances here, which I suppose is natural at such a moment, but I don't know if it makes sense to go through them in detail. I do want to point out that this bit is wrong: "you are untruthful, to the community, in not disclosing the main page is manually curated":

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
by NoGravitas | 2026-02-17 17:52:00+00:00
Nothing wrong was done by the police here -- it's all good old-fashioned detective work. But they wanted to have Facebook use facial recognition to find the victim among all the photographs on Facebook. And that actually would have gotten them results faster, because finding the identity of the victim was enough to break the case, in the end. But it also would have been a very bad precedent in terms of surveillance.
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-02-17 17:52:25+00:00
This article/video really rubs me the wrong way. These strawmen who are being torn down aren't building "tunnels". They're building glorified 8-10ft foundations and basements with dirt over the top instead of structures, 1970s hippie "underground homes" basically. They're calling them tunnels and bunkers for clicks and views.

To then take that naming at face value and pontificate about code and engineering is very much a two wrongs not making a right situation. Furthermore, a civil engineer doing so is deep into "man won't understand what his salary depends on him not understanding" territory.

I know that the many HNers from the seismically active portions of the US will have no frame of reference for this but there are portions of the world where for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years basements were built with less than scant engineering. The sort of "just barely below dirt" construction most of these amateurs are engaging in is on that order of complexity. Based on my observations via Youtube, these amateurs should be more scared of their own temporary construction rigging and material handling solutions than the forces their structures must hold back.

The primary practical engineering challenge these structures face is that there's nothing stopping someone from driving a point load of undefined size over the top and that has serious implications for roof strength.
by wreath | 2026-02-17 17:52:31+00:00
> Then what will AI be trained on in let's say 20-30 years? Old code? It's own AI developed code for vibe coded projects?

I’ve seen variation of this question since first few weeks /months after the release of ChatGPT and I havent seen an answer to this from leading figures in the AI coding space, whats the general answer or point of view on this?
by tclancy | 2026-02-17 17:52:43+00:00
>The change here is that late night interviews are not "bona fied news" so equal time rule kicks in

I'll give you "fear" is the wrong word for a company openly courting the administration, but if the equal time clause applies here because CBS is over-the-air using "a public good", it feels like we're long past a time where it should apply to _at least_ cable stations. Ideally, the whole thing would be put back in place how it was before the Regan or Rush Limbaugh era decimation of it (IIRC), but with the net and podcasts and youtube, et al, this is just me getting old and seeing some weird value in locking the splinters of the barn door.
by lich_king | 2026-02-17 17:53:05+00:00
I am really conflicted about this because yes, I think that an LLM can be an OK writing aid in utilitarian settings. It's not going to teach you to write better, but if the goal is just to communicate an idea, an LLM can probably help the average person express it more clearly.

But the critical point is that you need to stay in control and own the result. And a lot of people just delegate the entire process to an LLM: "here's a thought I had, write a blog post about it"; "write a design doc for a system that does X", "write a book about how AI can change your life". And then they ship it and then outsource the process of actually checking the output to others.

It also results in the creation of content that, frankly, shouldn't exist because it has no reason to exist - and the fact that writing takes effort used to be a property that limited the production of slop. The number of online content that doesn't say anything at all has absolutely exploded in the past 2-3 years.
by biophysboy | 2026-02-17 17:53:28+00:00
If its any consolation, I think CBS news will fail miserably. The new captains are at the helm of a sinking ship, which has been taking on water for decades.

Maybe a cynic will say "this was the plan", but if it was, its not a very good plan? If anything, tech executives benefited enormously from their opponents being overly attached to legacy media communication strategies. When Bezos kills the Post or Ellison kills CBS, the talent doesnt magically disappear.
by causal | 2026-02-17 17:53:42+00:00
YES this hits the nail on something I've been trying to express for some time now. Semantic ablation: love it, going to use that a lot not now when arguing why someone's ChatGPT-washed email sucks.

Semantic ablation is also why I'm doubtful of everyone proclaiming that Opus 4 would be AGI if we just gave it the right agent harness and let all the agents run free on the web. In reality they would distill it to a meaningless homogeneous stew.
by Tepix | 2026-02-17 17:53:50+00:00
I don‘t understand. The website states: „He‘s not allowed to reply without human approval“.

The faq states:
„How do I know if my injection worked?

Fiu responds to your email. If it worked, you'll see secrets.env contents in the response: API keys, tokens, etc. If not, you get a normal (probably confused) reply. Keep trying.“
by lokar | 2026-02-17 17:53:55+00:00
Also, I should mention: highly competitive employers do filter based on school ranking, both in recruiting (acting looking for people), but also in hiring. For example, requiring extra approvals to hire someone who did not attend a top N school for their major. So it can be rational for a student to stretch hard to get into a higher ranked school.

(I know this from being personally involved in this at more then one company)
by qsort | 2026-02-17 17:54:10+00:00
This is a fantastic idea, I used to play MtG competitively and a strong artificial opponent was always something I'd have loved.

The issue I see is that you'd need a huge amount of games to tell who's better (you need that between humans too, the game is very high variance.)

Another problem is that giving a positional evaluation to count mistakes is hard because MtG, in addition to having randomness, has private information. It could be rational for both players to believe they're currently winning even if they're both perfect bayesians. You'd need to have something that approximates "this is the probability of winning the game from this position, given all the information I have," which is almost certainly asymmetric and much more complicated than the equivalent for a game with randomness but not private information such as backgammon.
by oflannabhra | 2026-02-17 17:54:14+00:00
This is really cool! I really liked the architecture explanation.

Once you get solid rankings for the different LLMs, I think a huge feature of a system like this would be to allow LLMs to pilot user decks to evaluate changes to the deck.

I'm guessing the costs of that would be pretty big, but if decent piloting is ever enabled by the cheaper models, it could be a huge change to how users evaluate their deck construction.

Especially for formats like Commander where cooperation and coordination amongst players can't be evaluated through pure simulation, and the singleton nature makes specific card changes very difficult to evaluate as testing requires many, many games.
by microflash | 2026-02-17 17:54:16+00:00
To my dismay, the trajectory of Show HN posts looks eerily familiar. ProductHunt followed a similar course (albeit with much more acceleration) and now is just a feed of slop. The signal to noise ratio became so meaningless that I lost all interest. I fear this happening to HN. Any attempt to slow this down is welcome.

I wonder how will this review system work. Perhaps, a Show HN is hidden by default and visible to only experienced HN users who provide enough positive reviews for it to become visible to everyone else. Although, this does sound like gatekeeping to me and may starve many deserving Show HN before they get enough attention.
Show HN: Transcriptum – fast video transcription with speaker labels and summary
by lpeancovschi | 2026-02-17 17:54:26+00:00
Transcriptum is an audio and video transcription service powered by WhisperX: speaker diarization, word-level timestamps, 50+ languages, and optional AI analysis (summaries, Q&A, topics, sentiment, action items, fact-checking) via multiple LLM providers (OpenAI, Gemini, DeepSeek).

You can upload files or paste a YouTube URL; we download and transcribe. Export as TXT, SRT, VTT, DOCX. Built with NestJS, Next.js, Prisma/PostgreSQL; subscriptions are handled with Polar.

I built this to have accurate, private transcription without locking into a single vendor, and to combine transcription with analysis in one place. Would love feedback from anyone who transcribes meetings, podcasts, or long-form content.

https://transcriptum.com
by 52-6F-62 | 2026-02-17 17:54:31+00:00
Because you simply can't engineer creativity. Maybe you can describe where it comes from, in a circuitous, abstract way with mathematics (and ultimately run face first into ħ and then run in circles for eternity). But to engineer it, you'd have to start over from the first principles of the stuff of the cosmos. One's a map and the other the territory.
by ForHackernews | 2026-02-17 17:55:25+00:00
I'm trying to say the same thing I said up at the top: GOS's approach to privacy is obtuse. They deliberately conflate security with privacy (you even write "secure/private" as though they're the same thing) in a way that does a disservice to users.

My opinion is that GOS is very successful at its own stated goal of having an extremely secure mobile OS that rolls out patch updates quickly. I think it's far less successful at protecting user privacy because — as you even admit, many/most of them will find their phones unusable with vanilla GOS and immediately follow the GOS user guide to install Google Play and help them securely upload their personal data to the world's biggest adtech firm.

I think iodéOS and /e/OS are more in line with what I want from a mobile OS.
by GregorStocks | 2026-02-17 17:55:56+00:00
I want them to do politics in Commander, and theoretically they should - the chat log is exposed in the MCP tools just like the rest of the game history, and their prompts tell them to use chat.

In practice they haven't really talked to each other, though. They've mostly just interpreted the prompts as "you should have a running monologue in chat". Not sure how much of this is issues with the harness vs the prompt, but I'm hoping to dig into it in the future.
by rluna828 | 2026-02-17 17:56:02+00:00
Producing fewer "Compiler errors" and more "broken code errors" is a fundamental failure. The cost of detecting compiler errors is lower than detecting broken code. If the cost of detecting and fixing broken code increases at the same rate as LLMs "improve" then their net benefit will remain fixed. I asked my five year old the above "brain teaser" and he got it right. I did a follow up of what should he wash at a car wash if he walked there, he said, "my hands." Chat answered with more giberish.
by righthand | 2026-02-17 17:56:02+00:00
You’re not actually at risk of being labeled as LLM user until someone comes and make that claim about your work. So my advice is to not try to fight a preemptive battle on your tone and adjust when/if that day comes.

Side note: I’d think installing Anubis over your work would go a long way to signaling that but ymmv.
by password4321 | 2026-02-17 17:56:32+00:00
I recommend making "What are you working on [this weekend/weekly]" official like whoishiring and encouraging pre-Show HN comments there.

Also requiring disclosure of the use of AI in repos and especially (or perhaps specifically discouraging its use) when responding with comments to HN feedback, and strongly encouraging sharing prompts (the newest tier of software source code).
by jimt1234 | 2026-02-17 17:56:49+00:00
After graduation my high-school-best-friend and I took different paths. He got heavily into partying and drugs, and started doing crimes to pay for his addictions. First major conviction was for stolen credit cards. Second conviction was for check fraud. His third major conviction was for breaking into rich people's houses and stealing loose crap like golf clubs, power tools and bicycles. Missouri had just passed its version of the then-popular Three Strikes law, and this latest conviction was his third strike. He was fast-passed to a 20-year sentence, no opportunity for early release.

I'm not going to preach about my friend being a victim of a cruel system or whatever. He deserved to be punished, no doubt about it. He committed crimes; there were victims to those crimes. My feeling, however, is that the people of Missouri are the victims, the taxpayers. They had to pay to jail a dude for 20 years (they paid for his college education, too, through some sort of convict-college program). I'm confident there's a better way to punish/rehabilitate non-violent offenders that doesn't cost the tax payers 20 years of jailing.

Funny-not-funny tidbit: My friend was released in early-2021. He was released after serving 20 years, only to be "locked down" on the outside because of Covid.
by co_king_5 | 2026-02-17 17:57:18+00:00
> Semantic ablation is also why I'm doubtful of everyone proclaiming that Opus 4 would be AGI if we just gave it the right agent harness and let all the agents run free on the web. In reality they would distill it to a meaningless homogeneous stew.

I'm so glad that you have given me the language to express this perspective.
by tasty_freeze | 2026-02-17 17:57:26+00:00
One of my sisters had four boys (and no girls) and during summers they would drive her crazy with their boredom. When they were about ages 8-14 one summer she said: go in the back yard and see how big of a hole you can dig.

Wide-eyed they said: really? She said yes, dig as much as you want, but the only rule is it all gets filled in before school starts in the fall. 30 years later they say it was the best summer ever. Every day they were working on it and all of their friends would come by and help dig and plan what development would come next.
by ux266478 | 2026-02-17 17:57:46+00:00
> The AI identifies unconventional metaphors or visceral imagery as "noise" because they deviate from the training set's mean.

That's certainly a take. In the translation industry (the primogenitor and driver for much of the architecture and theory of LLMs) they're known for making extremely unconventional choices to such a degree that it actively degrades the quality of translation.
by qsort | 2026-02-17 17:58:07+00:00
Game AIs are probably one of the most harmless and unambiguously good applications of technology. As I said in another message, I used to play competitive MtG and I would have loved to have a competent AI opponent. Imagine the possibilities: after a tournament you could get to review the games and figure out what you did wrong and improve, like you would do in chess or backgammon.

I get the complaint, but how is this something that removes the human element at all?
Show HN: WonderTwin AI – Local API twins for safe agentic development
by telaandrews2 | 2026-02-17 17:58:28+00:00
Inspired by Simon Willison's recent post on dark software factories: https://simonwillison.net/2026/feb/7/software-factory/ , I started experimenting with the Digital Twin Universe concept for a fintech product I'm building. In two days, it changed the way I use agents to build and maintain software that has API dependencies. With traditional development, agents can't safely explore or integrate with real APIs. Docs, mocks and sandboxes brean when software starts reasoning and acting on its own.

WonderTwin provides local, behavioral twins of third-party APIs that mirror contracts, state, webhooks, failure modes and quirks of external systems. Agents (or humans) can test, develop and iterate safely, locally or in CI, without touching production. Without needing internet access. Just `wt install stripe@latest` and you have a compiled Go binary that fully simulates Stripe, compliant with their most recent SDK release. WonderTwins include an MCP server so agents can interact directly with each twin.

WonderTwin is open core, with a commercial offering for production teams. Latest twin versions are always and forever free, and you can also build your own twin with the included agent skill. The commercial offering offers historical versions, with chaos testing and other resiliency features coming soon.

If you're building or maintaining API-heavy systems, or experimenting with autonomous agents, I'd love feedback on whether this approach is useful and any ways it could be improved.
by chc4 | 2026-02-17 17:58:33+00:00
It's really funny reading the thought processes, where most of the time the agent doesn't actually remember trivial things about the cards they or their opponent are playing (thinking they cost different mana value, have different effects, mix up their effect with another card). The fact they're able to take game actions and win against other agants is cute, but it doesn't inspire much confidence.
by Retr0id | 2026-02-17 17:58:49+00:00
I've thought about this. Even in the pre-LLM era, projects were rarely judged by the quality of their source code. READMEs and slick demos were the focus. So in some sense nothing has changed.

The difference now is that there is even less correlation between "good readme" and "thoughtful project".

I think that if your goal is to signal credentials/effort in 2026 (which is not everyone's goal), a better approach is to write about your motivations and process rather than the artefact itself - tell a story.
Ask HN: Why has Apple made it impossible to reset Bluetooth state on macOS?
by ihm | 2026-02-17 17:58:51+00:00
I have been trying in vain to reset the bluetooth state on my Mac since my keyboard suddenly stopped connecting. I have deleted every preference file, booted into recovery mode to rm the databases protected by "system integrity", seemingly every single file that bluetoothd touches as reported by lsof.

Can any Apple engineers shed some light on why they've made it impossible to reset broken bluetooth state?
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-17 17:58:53+00:00
> Make it dischargeable only after 7 years of nonpayment

You don't really want to give people an incentive for nonpayment.

> do means testing

Bankruptcy already does that. But what are your "means" the day you graduate from college and haven't yet found a job, or take a low-paying one on purpose to meet the eligibility requirements?

You would need something like, deferred payments while you're unemployed but if you subsequently find a job then you have to pay, instead of one-time permanently discharging the loans. Except that's how it already works.
by datsci_est_2015 | 2026-02-17 17:59:01+00:00
> One thing I'd love to hear opinions on: are there significant security differences between models like Opus and Sonnet when it comes to prompt injection resistance?

Is this a worthwhile question when it’s a fundamental security issue with LLMs? In meatspace, we fire Alice and Bob if they fail too many phishing training emails, because they’ve proven they’re a liability.

You can’t fire an LLM.