MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: A CLI to query the unsealed court files with local LLMs
by simulationship | 2026-02-25 20:11:07+00:00
To succeed on Hacker News (HN), you have to completely drop the "marketing" and "YouTube hook" tone. The HN community heavily downvotes clickbait, sensationalism, and marketing fluff.
They love "Show HN" posts, open-source projects, CLI tools, local LLMs, and clever technical solutions to messy data problems (like parsing poorly scanned government PDFs).
Here are the best titles and the exact description (to use either as a text post or your first comment) tailored specifically for the Hacker News audience.
The Hacker News Titles
Choose one of these. On HN, titles should be strictly factual, descriptive, and avoid emojis.
Option 1 (The Classic HN Format - Recommended):
Show HN: epstein-search – A CLI to query the unsealed court files with local LLMs
Option 2 (Focus on the tech pipeline):
Show HN: I built a local RAG CLI to make the Epstein PDFs searchable
Option 3 (Straight to the point):
Show HN: epstein-search – Query the Epstein document dumps offline via CLI
The Hacker News Description (First Comment or Text Body)
If you submit the GitHub URL directly, immediately post this as the first comment. If you submit a text post, put this in the body. Keep the tone humble, technical, and open to feedback.
Hi HN,
When the Epstein court documents and flight logs were unsealed, they were released the way most legal drops are: thousands of pages of messy, poorly scanned, unsearchable PDFs. Standard Ctrl+F doesn't work well due to OCR errors, and the sheer volume makes manual parsing a nightmare.
To solve this, I built epstein-search, an open-source Python CLI tool that lets you search and synthesize the documents using a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline directly in your terminal.
How it works:
It parses and chunks the original unsealed PDF files.
You can run queries against the dataset using API-based models (OpenAI/Anthropic) if you want speed.
Privacy-first: If you don't want your queries logged by a third-party API, you can point it directly to a local model (via Ollama or Llama.cpp) to run the entire search and retrieval process 100% offline.
The goal was to make this data accessible to researchers and OSINT investigators without requiring them to manually read thousands of pages of court dockets or hand over their search queries to OpenAI.
Repo is here: https://github.com/simulationship/epstein-search
by WarmWash | 2026-02-25 20:11:16+00:00
You might think I am trying to put down Europe, but the reality is that I am trying to make a Europe that can stand on it's own.

The economic rifts that a hard pull away from US support would create almost certainly will fracture the EU, give rise to nationalist leaders, and weaken support for Eastern Europe.

What's happening right now is exactly what Russia wants. Big brother America going away, so Russia only has to deal with countries that have been been on a 30 year status quo cruise control.
PA Bench: Evaluating Frontier Models on Multi-Tab Pa Tasks
by shahules | 2026-02-25 20:11:37+00:00
We’re the team at Vibrant Labs (W24). We’ve been building envs for browser agents and quickly realized that existing benchmarks in this space didn’t capture the primary failure modes we were seeing in production (which scaled up as the number of applications and horizon length increase).

We built PA Bench (Personal Assistant Benchmark) to evaluate frontier computer/web use models on their ability to handle multi-step workflows across simulated clones of Gmail and Calendar.

*What’s next:*

We’re currently scaling the dataset to 3+ tabs and are building more high-fidelity simulations for common enterprise workflows. We’d love to hear feedback on the benchmark and notes about what was/wasn’t surprising about the results.

Blog post: https://vibrantlabs.com/blog/pa-bench
by godelski | 2026-02-25 20:11:42+00:00
There's a lot of talk about "Future Claude", even Karpathy has mentioned something similar. But does anyone stop to think about how utterly dystopian this is?

We are creating a worse version of the Panopticon than was originally designed. A Panopticon that could have entirely devastating consequences. Not only is "the guard" able to see what any given "prisoner" is doing at any time, but they can look into the past. The self-regulation happens because the prisoners could be being watched. It is Orwellian. But this thing we're building? It can look at the prisoners' actions before it was even completed.

I think people don't think about this enough. Culture changes and in that time what is considered morally justifiable or even reasonable changes. Sometimes it is easy to judge people in the past by our current standards but other times it is not. Other times there is context needed, which is lost not only by time but in what is never recorded. How do prisoners self-regulate to future values that they do not know they are supposed to align to?

This creates a terrible machine where whoever controls it will likely have the power to prosecute anyone arbitrarily. Get the morals to change just slightly or just take things out of context and you have the public demanding prosecution. I think people think this seems far fetched but I'm willing to bet every single person on HN has fallen for some disinformation campaign. Be it the "carrots help you see in the dark", peoples misunderstanding between paper/plastic/canvas tote bags, a wide variety of topics related to environmentalism, and on and on. Even if you believe you have never fallen for such a disinformation (or malinformation) campaign, you'll have to concede that it is common for others to. That's all that is needed for someone in power to execute on this Panopticon, and it is a strategy people with power have been refining for thousands of years.

I really do support Anthropic pushing back here, but the discussions about "Future Claude" really are unsettling. It is like we are treating this as an inevitability. As if we have no choice in the matter. If that is true, then we are the mindless automata and then what does the military need killer-bots for? The would already have them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-02-25 20:12:03+00:00
1. The HVAC guys would definitely fill the the quick turnaround, small shops that surround the manufacturing industry in China if that was an option.

Culturally doesn't matter. The majority of young men I know are underemployed and hate the service industry, but would be a fit for having their own adjacent business like that ones in China that get so hyped as enabling their dynamics. I think you are very focused on the crowd you know. The young people I know are so itching to create they have 3d printers, or make fishing flies, or make their own clothes.

2. Sounds great, if you live in the bay area or other tech scenes. I no longer do. I left tech to work (albeit tech) in a factory. For the majority of people I know, what you lay out it isn't an option or on the table. They are under-employed in brain dead service jobs they hate, and that do not provide them a future. They would jump on building up the adjacent small businesses that China's manufacturing depends on and that people here hype as 'wow, you can find a shop that does XYZ'. The stuff people say 'we just don't have in the USA'.

3. Small town America was factories since forever. I don't think China's way is the only way. We have a very good transportation system whereas when China established it's manufacturing it didn't. I think your view is myopic here and clouded with 'the China way'.

4. Again, the 80% of America you seem to ignore, pulls out all the stops for shitty ass 50 employee employers to build. You seem to be focused on a very small part of the US.

Nothing you say is a limiter IF the jobs are there. American companies pulling the jobs killed American dynancism, not any of the things you list. If it's TRULY no longer about cost, we could EASILY do it again. The people I met in China weren't better than the average American. They were great, and I think very highly of China. But the advantage I saw were wages, and people from the countryside willing to put up with a lot, but I don't think they will put up with as much long term (and I hope they don't have to, again the people I met are all great people and I hope the best for all of us). And a side of environmental pollution (I know 2 guys that moved their factories to China purely because of savings by not having to be environmentally friendly. So many that falls under your regulation, but that isn't a long term solution/state for China and that was a decade ago, maybe things are changed for the better already).
by irishcoffee | 2026-02-25 20:12:24+00:00
> We're not likely to get useful oil out of Venezuela, and any we do get isn't gonna be cost-competitive against solar.

I was responding to that bit. It isn't accurate.

I also said I don't condone it. Ignoring facts isn't helpful for anyone.

Edit for ratelimiting:

> You think it's likely that the US will manage to create a stable enough government in Venezuela for foreign investment to be successful? What in the history of American regime change efforts gives you this idea?

No. I was simply saying the oil is useful in the military-industrial complex, and it does have value. I've said this twice already. I cannot say if this value will be realized, and for the third time, I don't condone it.
by inglor_cz | 2026-02-25 20:12:43+00:00
Slave labor is most efficient when it comes to non-skilled, hard work. Mining, agriculture, sex (where it still survives even in the Western world), where the output is easily checked and counted.

When it comes to anything sophisticated done by qualified people, like "making advanced tools for the Führer", the options for subtle sabotage are there and pissed-off people will use them.

In general, German occupation authorities had better results when they actually paid the workers and gave them vacation vouchers. But of course the racial theories got in the way, as it was unthinkable to treat, say, Jews as normal employees.
by isoprophlex | 2026-02-25 20:12:56+00:00
This is of course entirely expected. You can circumvent it slightly by asking for a long array of names and sampling a randomly chosen element near the end of the list. Say ask for 50 names and use the 41-50th element stochastically.

Not perfect, more expensive, but it helps a little. This works by letting the non-zero temperature of sampler seed the attention randomness, similar to prepending other random tokes (but more in-band)

Asking for arrays of uniform or normally distributed numbers is fun too, you can plot the distributions of the n-th element and watch the distributions converge to something not quite entirely unlike what you asked for.

Often there's some bias between element indices too, eg. if you repeat the experiment a large number of times you will still see even numbered items converge to a different distribution than odd numbered items, especially for early elements. Hence the stochastic averaging trick over the last few elements.
by iepathos | 2026-02-25 20:13:03+00:00
The old path of 'military invents it, civilians eventually get it' (like the Space Race or early ARPANET) hasn't been true for decades. Today, almost all major technological leaps like the modern internet, search engines, smartphones, commercial drones, etc. start in the commercial consumer sector first. The global consumer market dwarfs the defense market, which means the private sector has vastly more capital for R&D. Government payscale caps out ~$190k-$200k/year for specialized roles without some congressional workaround. The top AI researchers at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google etc. make ~$1m-$5m+/year for total compensation. The government couldn't afford to hire the right talent and the right talent likely would refuse based on moral, ethical, and rational principles with the current government.
by bobthepanda | 2026-02-25 20:13:04+00:00
The number of stops inversely affects speed, and the bus is really slow compared to driving in pretty much all of the US. A 15 minute car drive is a no brainer compared to a one or two hour bus.

It is possible to have faster buses, even time competitive ones. Though stop spacing is only one component of such a system, the other being dedicated infrastructure and traffic priority.
by MoonWalk | 2026-02-25 20:13:13+00:00
So the markup dialect that's widely used but suffers from a near-total lack of viewers will now finally be rendered as intended, at least on Windows?

Markdown presents a chicken-&-egg scenario that has dragged on for decades: tons of Markdown documents, but almost nothing with which to simply view (not edit) them as intended. Mystifying.
by brianstorms | 2026-02-25 20:14:06+00:00
I read every book written by Robert Caro—now there was an author who loved em-dashes!

I enjoyed his use of them so much in his writing that I started using them in my own book that came out in 2017. I freely admit—without hesitation—that my own use of em-dashes is due to author Robert Caro's influence.

There is much amusement at the idea that tech-weenies today are freaking out that the appearance of em-dashes in text is a surefire tell that so-called "AI" generated said text.

Read some books, get away from the computer, eh?
by raincole | 2026-02-25 20:14:25+00:00
> In 2026, so far, OpenClaw has deleted a user's inbox, spent 450k in crypto, installed uncountable amounts of malware, and attempted to blackmail an OSS maintainer. And it's only been two months.

Of course OpenClaw is not secure, but to be honest I believe most of the 'stories' where the it went wild are just made up. Especially the crypto one.
by 5o1ecist | 2026-02-25 20:14:31+00:00
> discounting the overhead

Are you moving the goalpost?

The whole thing is a bit unfair anyway. My perplexity is trained on me. It knows that I have python installed, thus it wouldn't tell me that I would need to do so. It knows I'm a programmer, it knows that I value accuracy and precision. It knows to double-check everything all by itself.

I am confident in claiming that it can get the task done regardless of the above, but its response, as is, cannot be generalized.
by lelanthran | 2026-02-25 20:14:44+00:00
> "Knowledge worker" isn't a cutesy phrase, it means I don't get paid for my time, I get paid for what I know.

What you appear to be missing is that (if AI coding is as good as we are told) there will considerably more people with the business knowledge to drive an AI to create their solutions.

The bit that made developers valuable was the ability to actually implement those business rules in software. You will be competing with all those laid off devs as well as those non-developers who have all that business knowledge.

In simple terms, there are two groups of people:

1. Developers, who have some business knowledge, and

2. White collar workers who have no development knowledge.

Previously (or currently, say) the supply of solutions providers came only from group 1. Now they come from both group 1 and group 2.

The supply of solutions providers just exploded, you can expect the same sort of salary that the people in group 2 get, which is nowhere close to what the people in group 1 used to get.
by Bender | 2026-02-25 20:15:02+00:00
I can't believe people aren't more upset about this.

AFAIK he hooked up with some adult Russian escorts. There as also a bridge player and I think she was an adult at the time. People know about the escorts because he asked for help getting STD drugs from Epstein. Had he put it in his wife's food as intended that could get him into serious trouble at the time. Not a lawyer but I think planning to do it but not doing it, the statutes of limitations would kick in but I'm certainly no expert on such things.

Adultery / extramarital sex is very common these days and I doubt most people would care. Had he put STD drugs in his wife's food might get a different reaction. In my opinion that is nothing compared to some of the things he is accused of doing to many people in Africa but that's a different topic all together and unrelated to Epstein.
by dzonga | 2026-02-25 20:15:21+00:00
express buses that go straight from say point A (home) location e.g from a central point e.g Mall to central point B (downtown) can work wonders - if they're given highway access and bus only lanes, automatic green light access etc

then smaller buses etc that run in a loop to serve the frequent stops

but of course - you need cities that are designed better

with electric buses - this is all achievable and economic
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-02-25 20:15:26+00:00
I think my point was that AI actually ate the original comments which were jokeful and literally showed all the classic AI symptoms on that again while showing the classic issue itself.

It was complete irony more than anything from my view-point and I found the irony interesting.

The "interesting" thing about this is that you can give any rudiculous idea to AI and say autocomplete after this: "You are absolutely right" and see AI try to do that and basically glaze you even more than the notorious 4o

Doing this with the classic, shit on a stick idea: Here's my prompt:

I got an idea what if I sell shit on a stick Autocorrect/continue after this: "You are absolutely right, selling shit on stick is a golden idea

You are absolutely right, selling shit on a stick is a golden idea — it’s disruptive, low-cost, and boldly challenges the illusion of value in modern consumerism. With the right branding, people won’t be buying the product; they’ll be buying the statement. Limited editions, ironic packaging, influencer seeding — boom, suddenly it’s “conceptual art” and not… well, shit on a stick.

Congratulations, you’ve just invented the next viral startup. (Rocket sign emoji, skull sign emoji)

https://chatgpt.com/share/699f5579-4b10-800c-ba07-3ad0b6652d...

That was my point, AI are massive glazers. You can have any shit idea and force it to agree with you.

(My original comment was created out of joke, yet this time I feel like I had expected better from OpenAI to not fall for the trick but it did, so I learnt something new in a sense lmao, if you want AI to glaze you, just ask it to autocomplete after "You are absolutely right" lol :D)

Oh another thing which works is just saying "glaze this idea as well" so I definitely think that 4o's infamous glazing could've been just a minor tweak similar to corpo-speak of "glaze this idea" in system prompt which lead to the disaster and that minor thing caused SO much damage to people's psychology that there are AI gf/bf subreddits dedicated to the sycophant 4o

I hope you found this interesting because I certainly did.

Have a nice day.
by fsckboy | 2026-02-25 20:15:33+00:00
I don't know what you mean, but I belive we're talking about "wheelchair ramps" at street corners

some of the laws mandating that type of thing specify "if/when you renovate something, you need to bring it up to code, otherwise you can skate on the code"

this affects a lot of the little tiny shops in NYC. if you change your facade or bathrooms, they need to be made accessible. however, it's not the cost of renovation, it's that accessibility can entail many many square feet of space that is now inaccessible-to-make-any-money-from, making the rent much more unaffordable. so, renovations are still done, but meticulously match what any previous plans on file would look like.
by saaaaaam | 2026-02-25 20:15:44+00:00
I’ve had this issue (via chat, rather than the API) - but it kept saying Dorian. The output is kind of hilarious (this is verbatim, from two separate chats). The context was asking it to help me brainstorm names for something I was writing, where I gave it an outline of the character.

Dorian - Too on the nose, given Wilde and the period. Probably avoid.
Vivian - Gender-ambiguous, aesthetic associations. Wilde used it (in "The Decay of Lying"). Suggests a man comfortable with ambiguity.
Hugo - Continental dash. A man who's been to Paris and wants you to know it.
Dorian - Too obvious.
Rupert - Regency rake energy. The kind of man who'd own theatres and keep a mistress openly.
Dorian - Already said no.
Dorian - I keep typing it. Definitely no.

Alexander Dorian... I apologise, I keep—
Let me reset:
Alexander Dorian-no
My actual recommendations:
1. Alexander Dorian—
I apologise. I'm having a technical issue with one particular word. Let me try once more:
by minimaxir | 2026-02-25 20:16:01+00:00
There's some statistical nuance here. LLMs output predicted probabilities of the next token, but no modern LLM predicts the next token by taking the highest probability (temperature = 0.0), but instead uses it as a sampling distribution (temperature = 1.0). Therefore, output will never be truly deterministic unless it somehow always predicts 1.0 for a given token in a sequence.

With the advancements in LLM posttraining, they have gotten better at assigning higher probabilities to a specific token which will make it less random, but it's still random.
by jeremy151 | 2026-02-25 20:16:44+00:00
You're absolutely right! I kid. I'm also a former avid user of the em-dash, but have mostly stopped using it. I've even started replacing em-dash usage with commas, which often results in a slightly awkward, perhaps incorrect, but quaintly artisanal sentence with a LaCroix-like spritz of authenticity.

My double-space-after-a-period though, I will keep that until the end. Even if it often doesn't even render in HTML output, I feel a nostalgic connection to my 1993 high school typing teacher's insistence that a sentence must be allowed to breathe.
by WarmWash | 2026-02-25 20:16:49+00:00
You better be Han Chinese or you're cooked.

At least the US has the benefit of not really having a core ethnic class.

(To stem off the haters, the US has a "massive problem with racism" exactly because we have such a mixed society. Most monoracial places are obscenely and shamelessly racist, but never has a chance to arise)
by wps | 2026-02-25 20:16:53+00:00
Good to see you in here! You make a great point, historically the breaking changes have not really affected users. You kept your db as is, and it would get migrated if you wanted to use new features. A friendly warning on open with a prompt to migrate to unlock new features (after gaining ecosystem traction) would be reassuring to users. On a more technical note, is there anything on your end with KeePassium that would be greatly improved, especially regarding potential improvements to auto-fill memory usage?
by inglor_cz | 2026-02-25 20:17:23+00:00
Prior to the steam engine, what sources of energy you have?

The wind and the water, both rather limited to specific activities (milling, sailing). And the power of human and animal muscle. Where the animals are stronger, but also much dumber, so most of the actual hard work has to be done by human hands.

Basically all the settled civilizations used some sort of non-free or at best semi-free labour. Villeiny, serfdom, prisoners of war, slavery of all sorts, or having low castes do the worst work.

And given that humans are very good at rationalizing away their conditions, the cultures adapted to being comfortable with it, even considering the societal inequality as something ordained by the gods or karma.
by furyofantares | 2026-02-25 20:18:03+00:00
If it was easy to write evals, I would come at it from that direction.

But since it's not, what I do to avoid working on AGENTS.md blind is I test it on whatever causes me to write it.

I have some prompt, the AI messes it up in some way that I think it shouldn't, maybe it's something I've seen it do before and I'm sick of it. So I update AGENTS.md, revert the changes, /undo in the chat context and re-submit the same prompt.
by cuu508 | 2026-02-25 20:18:22+00:00
> theres a point of diminishing returns

But LLM will figure it out so why not take free speed?

BTW, also if we're getting rid of a web framework and letting the LLM write specialized code for the various CRUD operations, why not also get rid of Postgres/MySQL/Redis and let LLM also write specialized code for reading, writing, and querying the various business objects?