MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by digiown | 2026-02-15 18:43:51+00:00
Brand-name clothes is not really a commodity, and there is nothing efficient about destroying inventory (at scale, destroying small returns might be efficient). The brand name is a psychological trick that transforms commodity items into premium products, and supply control (destruction) seeks to gatekeep the brand and maintain that image. It works because the cost of the textiles is a small fraction of their retail price. It wouldn't work for example for things that cost more to produce, like electronics, which is why those are usually sold refurbished.

Supply control usually benefits the producers, despite what it may seem (destroying items). Increasing the supply lowers the relative pricing power of the vendors, and reduces the price an average consumer pays for the same item, even if the retail price for the item technically increases.

I'd say it is good in the long run. If people spent less on clothes, they'd have more to spend on other goods and services or invest in productive endeavors.
by js2 | 2026-02-15 18:44:08+00:00
FWIW, the context of the Franklin quote is him defending the ability of the legislature to tax a family that was trying to bribe/lobby the governor to do otherwise.

The quote is in defense of the government: WITTES: It is a quotation that defends the authority of a legislature to govern in the interests of collective security. It means, in context, not quite the opposite of what it's almost always quoted as saying but much closer to the opposite than to the thing that people think it means.

https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...
by maerzhase3000 | 2026-02-15 18:44:20+00:00
AI will not eat UI.
Natural language doesn’t replace interfaces.
Interfaces encode structure, constraints, and decision paths.

People think too much about AI generating UI my idea is AI operating through them.

I’ve been working on a library that enables exactly that. The library lets you expose a structured UI context layer for AI agents. Make existing user interfaces understandable and actionable for AI agents.

The API is describe → plan → act: capture UI context, get instructions from an agent, execute them on the client.
by otterley | 2026-02-15 18:45:10+00:00
And therefore what, exactly? When you distill the two down to their essence, they’re similar in that they’re groups of people making written arguments against each other. (And, frequently, complaining about mistreatment.)

Are you trying to argue that people shouldn’t be taken at their word? Or that we shouldn’t challenge people who make unqualified legal assertions? I’m not sure what your point is.
by simonw | 2026-02-15 18:45:42+00:00
I think of that as the law of leaky abstractions - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a... - where the more abstractions between you and how things actually work the more chance there is that something will go wrong at a layer you're not familiar with.

I think of cognitive debt as more of a product design challenge - but yeah, it certainly overlaps with abstraction debt.
by selfsimilar | 2026-02-15 18:45:42+00:00
I know nothing about this author, but this reads to me a lot like late Philip K Dick but without the "what is real" element. After his religious event in 1974, he wrote some real bangers - A Scanner Darkly, Valis, The Divine Invasion - alongside his religious exegesis. This feels a bit like an alternate timeline where PKD saw even more drugs as the way to chase this feeling, but somehow came out the other side.
by hinata08 | 2026-02-15 18:45:57+00:00
you don't need warrants to query these databases

They went from warrant, to FISA, to just write a request about a name, to more or less describe a vague group of ppl on whom you want the data

You should watch this show. It's available online and pretty informative.

If things weren't bad enough in 2007, things that have changed since then are most notably the cloud act that was created, Ring that started to "backup" your home CCTV in the cloud, then also Ring that enabled so called "Search Parties" and made a superball ad about it
by michaelt | 2026-02-15 18:46:15+00:00
> Isn't that good though?

It's good for shoppers (if they're informed), the recycler, and the environment. It's bad for the original maker.

Imagine a factory mix-up means some ExampleCo jeans are made of much lower quality materials than normal. They'll wear out much faster. But ExampleCo's quality control does its job, notices the inferior quality before they hit store shelves, and sends them for recycling.

If the recycler sells them on ebay as 'never worn ExampleCo jeans' then:

1. Some people who would have paid ExampleCo for jeans instead pay the recycler - leading to lost sales.

2. Some of the customers complain online about the bad quality, damaging ExampleCo's reputation

3. Some of the customers ask for replacements, which are provided at ExampleCo's expense.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-15 18:46:24+00:00
There still are some high-quality internet-based products/services, but the most important of them are not exactly commercial, or they are even illegal, e.g. various digital libraries with old publications, archive.org, Wikipedia, Anna’s Archive, etc.

Also there are many online shops that are the best option for purchasing various things.

The greatest decline is in the search engines, which not only are overwhelmed by sites with fake content, but they generate fake content themselves, in the form of stupid answers that are offered instead of the real search results, whether you want them or not.

If you know precisely the Web sites that you want to use, it is still OK, but when you search something unknown, it has become horrible.
by written-beyond | 2026-02-15 18:47:15+00:00
I can bet that a single standard instance of existing tool like codex and Claude Code to do whatever someone with a convoluted setup like that can. It could be marginally slower if you but it's all literally just English language text files.

I use codex almost everyday, none of that is necessary unless you're trying to flatten up your resume.

It's micro services all over again, a concept useful for some very select organisations, that should've been used carefully turned into a fad every engineer had to try shoe horn into their stack.
by crazygringo | 2026-02-15 18:47:39+00:00
The purpose isn't information, the purpose is drama.

Er, sorry. I meant: the purpose isn't just drama—it's a declaration of values, a commitment to the cause of a higher purpose, the first strike in a civilizational war of independence standing strong against commercialism, corporatism, and conformity. What starts with a single sentence in an LLM-rewritten blog post ends with changing the world.

See? And I didn't even need an LLM to write that. My own brain can produce slop with an em dash just as well. :)
Show HN: FunWithText – Free browser PII sanitizer and prompt injection scanner
by atbj | 2026-02-15 18:48:39+00:00
I built this because I kept wanting to paste work documents into
ChatGPT but couldn't without manually removing names, emails and
other sensitive data first. Detects PII using regex + optional
Claude AI. Runs entirely in the browser — no data sent to servers
unless you enable AI detection.
by gjulianm | 2026-02-15 18:48:47+00:00
See https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38926075/. I was not aware of the ERSPC which came out late last year and gives better outcomes for screening, but overall the evidence is not super clear yet. There are possibly certain groups that can benefit from PSA screening more than others. Also, modern, more effective treatments might allow for later diagnosis with the same clinical results.
Ask HN: Post your visitor analytics – OS
by gethly | 2026-02-15 18:49:43+00:00
We're in the middle of one of the largest moves in computer history where the primary operating system, windows 11, is so bad that multi-decade users are now leaving it for linux, or mac. On top of that we have the tariffs and various geopolitical issue forcing or enticing customers to ditch windows or microsoft altogether.

There are various numbers floating around about the OS distribution, but I'd like to see some "real" data from people who run visitor analytics on their own projects and what numbers they are seeing.

Can you post percentage distribution of operating systems that visitors use on your projects?
Show HN: AI-Evals.io – Evaluate this site with the tools it reviews
by alexhans | 2026-02-15 18:49:49+00:00
I've been working on a site [1] to give people control of their LLM workflows through AI evals - automated checks that, once defined, let you move fast without regressions and cut through hype with proof.

That one-liner is aimed at software engineers, but I've spent my career helping cross-functional teams collaborate, and that's really what this is about. AI agents make powerful workflows very plausible, but only if teams can grow them incrementally without losing control - no vendor lock-in, no discipline silos, no blind trust in outputs.

The site tries to meet different audiences where they are, with mostly practice over theory: tool comparisons, minimal approaches, and freedom to work at whatever level of complexity serves you - whether that's Claude Code with Agent Skills, local models, or custom Python agents.

As a fun "eat your own dog food" experiment, I use the site itself as the reproducible cookbook ("eval-ception") [2]. It's the quickest way to feel what different eval tools are actually like in practice.

I welcome feedback, contributions, or stories. More on the project and what's coming [3]. It's a rewarding area once you realize you can keep control and move methodically - doesn't matter if it's the smallest model or a swarm.

[1] https://ai-evals.io/

[2] https://ai-evals.io/cookbook/eval-ception.html

[3] https://ai-evals.io/about/
by giantrobot | 2026-02-15 18:50:18+00:00
I see the primary issue with IPFS is a significant majority of all web users are on mobile. They can't act as content hosts or routers. In P2P parlance they can only ever act as leeches. Even people with full fledged computers the market is dominated by laptops. These have similar availability issues as phones even if they don't have the same storage or connectivity limitations.

Compared to the total number of users on the Internet relatively few have stable always-on machines ready to host P2P content. ISPs do not make it easy or at times possible to poke holes in firewalls to allow for easy hosting on residential connections. This necessitates hole punching which adds non-trivial delays on connections and overall poorer network performance.

It's less about imagination being dead but instead limitations of the modern Internet retards momentum of P2P anything.
by danielhjacobs | 2026-02-15 18:52:04+00:00
That documentation, for stubs, can be somewhat misleading. It just looks for the presence of an avm2_stub_method function call anywhere in the method, which may mean a method that's entirely a stub, or as is the case for NetConnection.connect, a method that is stubbed under specific conditions. NetConnection.connect is stubbed for specifically non-null, non-http commands (generally this is RMTP/RTMFP). See https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/blob/df11c2206bc6be0a329...
by syngrog66 | 2026-02-15 18:52:21+00:00
The surveillance industry has gotten out of hand. It is also true that there is ample reason to ignore and avoid anything coming out of the OA's author, who has a strong history of Russian-aligned propaganda efforts. Please don't cite him or amplify him further. Propaganda and disinfo ops worldwide are just as big of a problem as accelerating, unchecked, abused surveillance.
by GorbachevyChase | 2026-02-15 18:52:37+00:00
It wasn’t that long ago that we were experimenting on with llama derived models. There is still a lot happening with open weight models, but you may have to look at those models meant for targeting edge devices. In my own opinion, small models that can do useful work are going to become a much bigger deal in domains where data privacy is a requirement. Most businesses were technology is not the core mission do not want to host their own frontier models.
by peterfirefly | 2026-02-15 18:52:48+00:00
This is part of the European Green Deal. The link isn't clear about it but it's not a new rule that we can't destroy unsold textiles. That rule is from 2024. This is about some finer details and fixes to the 2024 rules.

The 2024 rules are from just before the European Elections, probably in the hope that the unusually red/green European Parliament 2019-2024 (the 9th European Parliament) could get more votes. Von der Leyen also basically had to sell her soul to get enough votes from the red/green parties to get elected, which had a large impact on the way her first Commission operated.

Unfortunately (for them), the 10th European Parliament (the current one) is a lot less red/green. Most member states have also realized that we have a lot of "environmental" regulation that is expensive without helping the environment much (and some cases harming it). We are already in the process of rolling some of it back. Maybe this particular regulation will also be rolled back during the 10th European Parliament.

---

The linked page has this text:

"Every year in Europe, an estimated 4-9% of unsold textiles are destroyed before ever being worn. This waste generates around 5.6 million tons of CO2 emissions – almost equal to Sweden’s total net emissions in 2021."

Really? The waste in terms of destroyed unsold textiles generates the same CO₂ emissions as Sweden in 2021? Sweden has a population of around 10 million = a bit more than 2% of the EU (I'm still mentally using the pre-Brexit half a billion number). It has lower CO₂ emissions per capita than most member states due to it having hydropower and nuclear power, but still... call it a round 1% of the total EU CO₂ emissions in round Fermi numbers.

The remaining 91-96% would presumably also generate CO₂ emissions -- 11-20 times as much, in other words roughly 11-20% of the EU CO₂ emissions. Concrete, bricks, heating, agriculture, chemical plants, commuting, etc. all have to share the remaining 80-91%.

I don't think that is very believable.

(A lot of the strangeness comes from using "total net emissions" which allows Sweden's number to go from around 30 million tons to apparently 6-7 million tons. Using the doctored number here makes the textile destruction appear much more wasteful than it really is, especially since the burning of said textiles can easily produce electricity and district heating.)
by dahart | 2026-02-15 18:53:06+00:00
I second the vote for orbit cam! Add double-click to choose the orbit point, and add a zoom control that is proportional to distance to orbit point, and it suddenly gets insanely easy to navigate the scene and find good views. It’s too hard to control using translate and look-around angles.

The demos I tried so far have translate and not pan, and those are fully 3d…
by al_borland | 2026-02-15 18:53:08+00:00
Thousands of decisions go into building a large SaaS product. Beyond that, it requires infrastructure and maintenance to run it. This can and will break. Even with AI, all of this does not become trivial.

Most companies want to focus on their actual business, which is why they go to SaaS in the first place. They won’t want to do all this stuff themselves, as it’s a distraction from the core business, and they won’t do it as well as people dedicated to building a SaaS product.
by gjulianm | 2026-02-15 18:53:30+00:00
> What this fails entirely to capture is that doing something to increase your odds of survival, damn the consequences, is an individual choice.

What you're failing to capture is that this is a hard problem because it's both an individual choice and a collective one as well. Those "terrible side effects" might actually end up killing someone. You're choosing between a high-chance lottery on a small population or a low chance lottery on a far larger one. It's not that simple.
by michaelt | 2026-02-15 18:54:11+00:00
I think that tonnage is for all textiles, not just high-end clothing.

https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/publications/the-destr... says "Based on available studies, an estimated 4-9% of all textile products put on the market in Europe are destroyed before use, amounting to between 264,000 and 594,000 tonnes of textiles destroyed each year."
by andy99 | 2026-02-15 18:54:41+00:00
The big question for me is when is the right time to get it. I saw something that said too soon and you lose some of the effect because it’s worn off by the time you’re really old and it would have been more useful.

So do you rush out and get it at 50, or even sooner, or try and wait until 60 or some other older age?
Show HN: Refine.tools – 10 free AI career tools, no signup, no data stored
by HarakiriGod | 2026-02-15 18:54:49+00:00
Hey HN. I built a suite of 10 free AI career tools. Resume builder, cover letter generator, salary negotiation scripts, voice-powered interview coach, job description analyzer, and a few more.

The whole thing runs in your browser. No accounts, no data storage, API calls go to OpenAI but nothing persists. Built with Next.js on Vercel.

It started as a personal tool to help me job hunt, and I kept adding stuff. Figured others might find it useful.

I'd love feedback on the tools themselves and what else would be useful to add.
by nine_k | 2026-02-15 18:56:05+00:00
I implemented "multitasking" (well, two-tasking) between a BASIC program and native code on a Z80, using a "supervisor" driven by hardware interrupts. There's just so much you can pack in a 4MHz CPU with a 4-bit ALU (yes, not 8-bit). It worked for soft-realtime tasks, but would be a rather weak desktop.
by vee-kay | 2026-02-15 18:56:38+00:00
Contaminated?! Nobody understood?!

You clearly haven't bothered to do your research.

But we cannot blame you for your ignorance.

It took many years for modern scientists to reverse engineer and start to understand the secrets of Wootz steel.

It took many years, but modern scientists have reverse engineered Wootz steel, and identified that it was the result of extraordinary metallurgical processes with scientific acumen and excellence based on millenia of experimentation and practice.

"conclusive evidence of the carbon nanostructure in the carburising slag from 400 BCE to 16th century CE, covering 2000 years of technological continuity":
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01675...

"Modern analysis of surviving Wootz ingots has revealed the critical presence of these impurities. Silicon, for instance, is thought to have aided in the complete removal of sulfur during the smelting process, a common contaminant that can lead to brittle steel. Phosphorus, on the other hand, while often considered detrimental in steelmaking, appears to have been essential in the formation of specific microstructures within the Wootz. The exact ratios and interactions of these elements were likely a result of empirical knowledge, painstakingly acquired through trial and error over centuries."
https://www.realloreandorder.com/the-ancient-nanotechnology-...
by jjkaczor | 2026-02-15 18:56:42+00:00
We don't even need to bring aliens into this scenario - as this is the direction we are already heading towards with fully automated manufacturing and AI replacing vast sectors of human labour...

(And yeah, I get it - no one "really" wants to work on a "soul-crushing" assembly/production-line... People want to make art (or games) or write novels... (both areas of creative work which are ALSO being targeted by AI)... but people definitely want to "eat" and have shelter and our whole system is built on having to pay for those priviledges...)
by notepad0x90 | 2026-02-15 18:56:49+00:00
How do you convince people to participate in a general strike when the tiktok, facebook (and as a result threads, instagram), and twitter are controlled by the whitehouse and are actively taking down such posts?

Even if you want to inform people the old fashioned way, or organize in person, a few might, but you need majority of voters, how can you reach them when they only want to be reached by mediums controlled by the white house?

> We still have the power to panic the billionaires

Yeah, and making them lose a few billions of dollars isn't it. Even criminal punishment is useless, they'll get pardons, and if not they can just flee to any country that would protect them for their money. there are ways to make them scared for real though.

> Only by shutting down the ports, the rail, the trucks and the delivery services

This is the right track for sure, but the problem is scale, you need coordination to do that. But more than that, you need lots of people agreeing to do without nice things like a good and stable economy, mass layoffs, and dire consequences that aren't worth mentioning here. Matter of fact, the one group of people in the world that could have the most impact are all gathered here on HN :)

For the extreme measures that need to be taken by the people to actually be taken, the people need to understand that those measures are neccesary, and actually be informed of the strategies behind those measures and have some awareness of some of the tactics available to implement those strategies.

The problem is, there is no one even considering any unconventional means. Anyone with power to act is waiting for elections and campaigns. Why can't people just read history and learn from it? Why do we need tragedies to keep teaching us the same lessons again and again. The people in charge are not idiots. they also know elections are ahead. They're actively ignoring courts and making clear and public threats of subverting elections. Why do people have to wait until that actually happens to plan ahead of time?

Americans are still in a catatonic state of "that could never happen here where I live", despite things that could never happen in America continuing to happen every day. The answer is the same as my original post: communications and media are controlled where they matter now.
by digiown | 2026-02-15 18:56:56+00:00
Brand value particularly for commodity products is usually just a form of information asymmetry between consumers and suppliers, and creates economic inefficiency since it diverts expenditure from other products that can materially improve lives. It also allows enshittification to happen since it creates inertia (brand loyalty) to switching, and the positive brand image sticks around for longer than the actual good quality products.
by arionhardison | 2026-02-15 18:57:05+00:00
I have been working on one kind of. Its no longer OSS because due to "vibe coding" I do not think OSS is a good idea anymore but I have been calling it "Palantir for the People". The 3 things you can checkout now (might be up and down - literally working and shipping as I get bugs fixed.

https://codify.la

https://codify.nyc

https://medicare.dev

These are in no way ready and I only now removed the HTTP basic auth so I could post here.