MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Vocab Top – AI-powered vocabulary builder with visual mnemonics
by Jaber_Said | 2026-02-23 00:26:14+00:00
Hi HN — I built Vocab Top because I kept looking up the same words over and over and never retaining them. Dictionary definitions weren't sticking.

The idea: use generative AI to surround every word with multiple memory anchors — a custom image, a mnemonic trick, example sentences, native audio, and grammatical forms — so your brain has more to hold onto.

Tech stack: Next.js 16, React 19, Tailwind CSS. The AI generation uses Google Gemini and FriendliAI. Audio is Google Cloud TTS. Words are saved to local storage — no account required.

The newest feature is Word Forms: when you search any word, you see all its conjugations, plurals, and gender variants. Click any form to copy it or hear its pronunciation.

Design decisions I'm still wrestling with:
- Local storage vs. user accounts (simplicity vs. cross-device sync)
- Pattern-based prompt construction vs. fine-tuned models for mnemonic quality
- How much content to generate per word (too much = overwhelming, too little = not useful)

Would appreciate feedback on the UX, the AI generation quality, or the overall approach. Especially curious if anyone has thoughts on whether visual mnemonics actually help retention or if it's just a nice-to-have
Show HN: Franklin Prompt Studio – Structured prompts for serious AI decisions
by dfstudioz | 2026-02-23 00:26:24+00:00
Hi HN,

Over the past few months I’ve been using AI heavily for business and technical decisions.

One thing kept bothering me:

When the question actually mattered, the answers felt vague.

Not because the model was bad — but because my prompts were unstructured.

Most AI prompts are missing things like:

Clear intent

Explicit constraints

Tradeoff mapping

Required assumptions

Defined output structure

Confidence framing

So the model gives information, but not decision clarity.

I built a small desktop tool called Franklin Prompt Studio to enforce structured reasoning in prompts.

Instead of typing a loose question, you construct a prompt that forces the model to:

Map constraints and competing goals

Compare tradeoffs (cost vs time vs risk vs quality)

List assumptions explicitly

Identify unknowns

Provide 2–4 options

Make a primary recommendation + why

State a confidence estimate

It’s not a new model.
It’s not a wrapper.
It just generates structured prompts that work with any AI.

Example:

Normal prompt:
“Should I invest $50k into X?”

Typical output:
Pros, cons, generic disclaimers.

Structured prompt output:

Constraints

Risk exposure breakdown

Tradeoff analysis

Explicit assumptions

Clear recommendation

Confidence level

The difference feels significant when the decision has real stakes.

I’m curious:

Do others here feel that AI answers degrade when the question isn’t tightly structured?

Are people solving this differently?

Is structured prompting overkill outside of technical users?

Would genuinely appreciate critique.

Link:
https://dfrankstudioz.gumroad.com/l/franklin-prompt-studio

Thanks.
by adw | 2026-02-23 00:26:45+00:00
For many software businesses, licensing is an issue. The spec is GFDL with GPL code samples, a non-cleanroom translation of the elisp parser would (likely) be GPL (or at least arguably enough so to keep lawyers busy), so going and doing some other roughly equivalent markup language instead avoids the copyleft requirements.

So, yes, “too much trouble”, much of it nontechnical.
by bilegeek | 2026-02-23 00:27:12+00:00
> where it seems almost any attempt to gatekeep is seen as a freedom violation

1.) Because it always seems to have an outsized impact on adults. Then the predators get away with it because the platforms DGAF (for example, Discord has had a MASSIVE problem with illegality for YEARS, with boatloads of reports and evidence that was blatantly ignored, and yet NOW they need your ID?) And any gate design that COULD work without PII won't be implemented because data is too juicy.

> Maybe this is why we need protocols over platforms?

> If counter culture gets driven back to IRC, or gasp meatspace, then all the better.

2.) Yes on both counts. But protocols need to be decentralized, massively scalable, available across every platform including phones, and normie-grade easy-to-use (not everybody, and it's getting better now, but lots of devs tend to give up here, like it's a binary choice between a lobotomized barely-functioning bloated Fisher-Price app and a fully-functioning lean app with awful UI. Shockingly difficult, as I discovered trying to program, but both possible and necessary.) But as for meatspace...

> we went from a world where most everything was intermediated by parents

3.) If anything, the world is intermediated by parents like never before.[1] Not everywhere, not everybody, but enough freedom of movement and gathering has been lost by children and teens that it is killing meatspace. This CANNOT be ignored if you want to address online problems. The internet, awful as it can be, is the only "free" place left to roam for many.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45945114
by paultendo | 2026-02-23 00:28:04+00:00
Of course Google can restrict how their API is accessed. But locking paid accounts with no warning, no explanation email, and no functioning support path while continuing to charge $249/month is a different problem entirely. A reasonable enforcement process would have been a warning email, grace period to stop using the tool, then restriction.

What an awful way to lose trust, locking out their users but billing them all the same.
by trey-orr | 2026-02-23 00:28:14+00:00
I just open-sourced PocketAgents: a complete AI backend in one executable.

Think of it like “everything behind your AI app” in one place:

- Multi-provider support (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.)

- Bring your own API keys

- Admin UI to manage everything

- Agent management (create, configure, run)

- Tool support (add and manage tools)

- Document processing (upload files, auto-chunk + embed)

- Built-in RAG (search your docs during chats)

- Auth + run monitoring out of the box

- No service spaghetti. No external DB setup.

Run one binary, open the UI, connect your app, ship.

Repo: https://github.com/treyorr/pocket-agents
by bradlys | 2026-02-23 00:28:21+00:00
Dancing is not considered cool. Most young people are too self-conscious about being seen dancing poorly. Even someone who is a professional dancer will be considered looking "lame" because they didn't dance the exact perfect way for the music (to whoever is looking) and so forth. Critique of dance is at all time high thanks to TikTok and other social media. People see the absolute best of the world at their absolute peak for short moments of time and extrapolate that's how you should be dancing at all times if you are going to dance.

Therefore, not cool to dance anymore. Everyone is too self-conscious.
by instig007 | 2026-02-23 00:28:53+00:00
Validating during parsing is still parsing, there's a reason why `Alternative f` exists after all: you have to choose between branches of possibilities and falsehoods. Now consider that there's another kind of validation that happens outside of program boundaries (where broader-than-needed data is being constrained in a callee rather than the calling site) that should've been expresed as `Alternative f` during parsing instead. That's the main point of the article, but you seem to only focus on the literal occurence of the word "validation" here and there.
by abetusk | 2026-02-23 00:29:04+00:00
Digital artifacts are the modern form of the means of production. Making digital artifacts available under a libre/free is giving these modern means of production to the public by putting it into the commons.

By requiring an interaction and explicit permission, you're putting yourself as a gate keeper to the means of production. In the best case, the uses will depend on your temperament at the time of request. In the worst case, such as a state backed morality commission, this could lead to corruption and abuse.

Part of capitalism is the ownership of private property, including intellectual property. If your focus is on making sure you have control over your work for things you think are moral, then the modern copyright system is in place for you to keep that control.

My focus is on empowering people with tools and making sure those tools aren't restricted in their use by a small oligarchy.
by artisin | 2026-02-23 00:29:04+00:00
Yup. Last week my Ultra account got ToS-banned from both the Gemini CLI and Antigravity simply for using OpenCode. Try as I might, I haven't been able to resolve the issue. I can technically still use the Gemini web/app, but it's remarkably terrible in just about every conceivable way. A truly impressive feat in itself.
Show HN: Raya – TypeScript-like language with Go-like concurrency model
by rizqme | 2026-02-23 00:29:08+00:00
Hi, this is my recent work of several months of Agentic Engineering.

So the background of this is I like building toolings / compiler, but never had the time since I run startups. So since the coding AI becoming better I started to build something that I for a long time wanted to build: own vm / runtime

So, the problem I want to solve is that I like Typescript and I like go-lang concurrency model, and there is no attempt building typescript-like runtime so I give it a shot.

It is using reactor model with io thread-pool and worker-threadpool, Stack based VM, thin task model with small initial stack like go.

The Idea is all execution is task, whenever a task is run, it will run until suspension point (channel, io, sleep, etc) no task can run more than 10 ms, it will be preempted at safepoint. I try to make task switching as cheap as possible

For JIT and AOT I use cranelift to generate machine code from SSA. I use prewarming using compile time heuristic and JIT hotpath profiling. It support also AOT. I make so that native code also follow the task model so it has safepoint, suspendable and preemptible.

Still early. Happy to hear feedback.
by sowbug | 2026-02-23 00:29:23+00:00
There's no rude way to call an API. As more of human communication and commerce gets refactored into cold agentic interactions, the issue of reputation just vanishes.

But there's more than shifting etiquette standards at stake. Every BigCorp is currently reworking their APIs to be agent-friendly. CAPTCHAs and "Contact Sales" forms are being ripped out because they have no place in a world where the customer expects a complete transaction in the next 300 milliseconds. Agentic customers will demand agentic support, or else they'll take their RPCs elsewhere.

So what happens when you're CEO of BigCorp, and 90% of your customers are code, served by code, and the rest are messy humans who forget their passwords, complain that your website layout is confusing, and demand to speak to the manager? Is that last 10% worth keeping? Can you imagine Amazon in 2030 deprecating support for human customers?

Maybe this sounds cool, especially if OpenClaw agents have been doing all your domestic online chores for the past couple years. But along the way social grace was refactored out.

You take a life-saving prescription drug via an off-label usage, and your employer's PBM updates to Care Schema 2.3, which makes it semantically impossible to get a refill. Or you bend down to get the mail on your front porch, the wind slams your front door shut, and your fingerprint no longer works to open the door, because as of noon, your mortgage payment was past due. You could easily pay, but your phone is inside, next to your sleeping infant's crib. The system is operating as designed.

This is how the world would work when it's intended for agentic interactions and humans are an afterthought.
by reliabilityguy | 2026-02-23 00:30:38+00:00
> Any society will collapse if deprived of essential goods by an external force.

IR is not deprived of essential goods. They are trading with all the neighbors and many international partners.

> Cultural practices that we disagree with can be remediated through peaceful means or at least settled by Iranians. It's not like women aren't capable of resistance or their own political voice.

Do you mean cultural practice of beating women to death for refusal to wear hijab? What is exactly the voice these women have?

> I presume you also wish to invade U.S. ally Saudi Arabia.

No, I am not. FWIW saudis seem to be totally fine with their ruling family. Iranians, on the other hand, are not. There is a huge difference between what we see in Iran, and what we see in SA. Moreover, saudis do no chant “death to america”, do not believe in the spread of Islamic revolution, and are not working on nuclear weapons.

> I also presume you also spend all day thinking about how you wish to destroy random African countries you barely know the name of.

Can you explain to me how did you get from me pointing out that IR is a regime governed by the idea of spreading Islamic revolution and random African countries?

> You believe in spreading "democracy" like a French revolutionary from the early 1800s.

lol no. You can’t spread democracy if locals don’t believe in democracy. Iranians believe in democracy, and they do have a chance once the regime is gone, or, at least they give up their nukes, and stop enrichment.

If Iran has nukes, Saudis and others in the region would want nukes. I think we need to have fewer nukes in the world and not more.
by throwaway87543 | 2026-02-23 00:32:03+00:00
Authentication & Authorization is a OS feature. But instead of the OS collecting everyone's age, just give parents the ability to verify their child's phone is in child lockdown mode. Then the phone narc's to the website: "the user is under age". Not "the user was born on Feb 29 2001." We can rely on parenting to ensure a child doesn't have a non child mode phone. Enable parents, not control everyone.
by keyringlight | 2026-02-23 00:32:26+00:00
I've found internet radio interesting, there's a ton of variety out there that you might not get on a local/national broadcast. Even within a genre, a lot of stations may routinely play the hits but introduce you to different 'sets' of other musicians. More generally on topic, I'd wonder about the approaches different stations and djs use to build their playlists.
by Razengan | 2026-02-23 00:34:13+00:00
> …LLMs have perverted the practical application of the art of computer programming. ("The LLM understands so I don't have to.") It's sad it happened during his lifetime.

If you see magazines articles or TV shows and ads from the 1980s (a fun rabbit hole on YouTube, like the BBC Archive), the general promise was that "Computers can do anything, if you just program them."

Well, nobody could figure out how to program them. (except the outcasts like us who went on to suffer for the rest of our lives for it :')

OS makers like Microsoft/Apple/etc all had their own ideas about how we should make apps and none of them wanted to work together and still don't.

With phones & "AI" everywhere we are actually closer to that original promise of everyone having a computer and being able to do anything with it, that isn't solely dictated by corporations and their prepackaged apps:

Ideally ChatGPT etc should be able to create interactive apps on the fly on your iPhone etc. Imagine having a specific need and just being able to say it and get a custom app right away just for you on your device.
Show HN: Bundling Linux inside an Android app to run OpenClaw
by coderredlab | 2026-02-23 00:34:31+00:00
Hi HN,

I built an Android app that bundles a minimal Linux environment and runtime to run OpenClaw locally on-device.

The motivation was simple: I didn’t want to spin up and maintain cloud VMs just to host an AI gateway. Modern Android phones are capable enough, so I experimented with packaging the runtime directly inside the app using proot.

The app installs a bundled Linux rootfs, runs the gateway inside that environment, and exposes the usual integrations (Telegram, Discord, OpenAI-compatible APIs). Everything runs locally on the phone — no external server required.

Some constraints I had to work around:

Android background execution limits

Battery and thermal considerations

File system isolation inside the app sandbox

DNS/network quirks in a proot environment

It’s not meant to replace proper infrastructure, but it works surprisingly well for lightweight, always-on personal setups.

Curious to hear if others have tried similar approaches on Android.

Happy to answer technical questions about the architecture, limitations, or trade-offs.
by rrix2 | 2026-02-23 00:35:15+00:00
If one could swipe through the center without inserting a space, it would be incredible instead of perhaps only great... There was a PalmOS 5 keyboard like this named myKbd(1) based on some IBM research(2) which was quite fast to use. the atomik layout was quite quick to use.

(1): https://palmdb.net/app/mykbd

(2): https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327051HCI172&3_4 https://blakewatson.com/uploads/2023/07/Performance_Optimiza...
by ryandrake | 2026-02-23 00:35:31+00:00
> You can upload unlimited flight logs for free.

> BUT you can only view the last 100 flights.

> If you want to see your older data, you have to pay a monthly subscription and a $15 "retrieval fee."

> Even then, you can't bulk download your own logs. You have to click them one by one. They effectively hold your own data hostage to lock you into their ecosystem. I am not sure if they are even GDPR complaint even in the EU

1. There is zero reason for this to be an online, cloud-hosted application. This is... a database. 20 years ago, this would have been a 400KB EXE you ran on your computer and that was that.

2. I hope people are not deleting their own logs after uploading them to this service. Surely, users aren't relying on this site as some kind of backup for their data. Especially when their business model appears to be clearly HostageWare.

EDIT-ALSO:

The legal basis for this threat doesn't make much sense. The company is saying that mere mentioning of their company (or product) name "uses the [product] name and brand as a commercial hook to drive traffic and adoption of your unfairly competing tools."

If this was enforceable, how would any project that provides open source compatibility with some company's proprietary format be legal? If I write a program that downloaded fitness data from my Garmin smartwatch and mentioned "compatible with Garmin smartwatches" on the project's GitHub, am I suddenly infringing their trademark? (Not looking for legal advice, just confirmation that this company's position is legally bizarre.)
by misir | 2026-02-23 00:36:45+00:00
> ePaper displays are niche, and worse for most personal and business use-cases compared to LCD et al.

Hence we need more resources for R&D to figure out the shortcomings. LCD didn't pop into existence randomly either. It's not a guaranteed win, but neither AI has proven any realized gains in the majority of industries that gambled on adopting it.
by windexh8er | 2026-02-23 00:37:27+00:00
There are lots of other eInk devices you can use LVGL with.

ReTerminal and other derivatives from Seeed Studio are two options. Seeed even has a newish color unitfor under $250 [0].

Not trying to diminish all of the thought and work that's gone into OPs project but a lot of this has been available to do in HomeAssistant for quite some time. Glad more people are finally seeing the value in eInk like this. I've been using them for a while in my office and bedroom for simple status as the OP states: only showing certain status depending on state.

The other unit I tinkered with quite a bit of is the Heltec Vision Master E290 [1] which is a 3" eInk devices for under $35. Based on ESP32 and has LoRa.

[0] https://www.seeedstudio.com/reTerminal-E1004-p-6692.html
[1] https://heltec.org/project/vision-master-e290/
by inigyou | 2026-02-23 00:37:29+00:00
OS vendors don't want to add this feature, though. And when they are mandated, like in Brazil, we HN commenters hate that even more, because apparently in Brazil it's illegal to sell a phone without locked bootloader, or an OS that can run software from outside of an app store, because the user might install an OS or an app that doesn't comply with the child-lock law.
by szmarczak | 2026-02-23 00:37:32+00:00
The way how you were using Windows did not matter. There was no way how Apple could distinguish this use anyway. Apple did not know if you were using Windows to extend the lifespan or just needed Windows apps. If you're allowing Windows, there's no reason to lock the bootloader down since people could heavily modify Windows and use Linux on Windows anyway.

Since Apple has moved onto arm, they don't need to lock it down, at least yet, because Windows is a no-go on arm, and it's slowly becoming AI slop anyway. There's only Linux but then if they locked the bootloader down they would distance themselves from the competition. And people do write drivers for macs.

Meanwhile jailbreaking iOS or iPadOS has more use than doing anything you want on macOS. For example removing ads on Spotify, YT or running cracked apps or ebooks. Yes, you can do the same on macs, but you do not keep a Mac in your pocket.

However if iPads and MacBooks become one thing, I'm pretty sure they're still be more restrictions.
by alexandre_m | 2026-02-23 00:38:15+00:00
It should be obvious that these services are operating at a loss. The monthly subscriptions especially, but I’m even skeptical that the linear API pricing is sustainable.

It feels like a classic “drug dealer” model to me. Get everyone hooked with cheap access, then raise prices later. Unless there’s a major breakthrough in the underlying technology, I don’t see how a significant price increase isn’t inevitable once adoption is locked in.
by pron | 2026-02-23 00:41:12+00:00
This future may come someday, but it's not here yet, not even with the post-late-'25 models. It assumes that agents can write reasonable code reliably, which they're currently far from doing (even 95% isn't enough, and I don't think we're at 95%).

Anthropic's C compiler experiment showed that even in a situation where people give the agent every imaginable advantage (above and beyond what they can reasonably do in most projects), i.e provide not only a very precise specificaton but also thousands of tests, a reference implementation to use as an oracle, and have the model trained on the reference implementaition - years of "preparation" effort - and all the agent has to do is just code, it still fails on a task that's certainly not trivial but also by no means monumental.

A lot of writing about agentic coding seems to assume that today's agent have coding down whereas the experience of anyone using them across different kinds of software work as well as tests by the labs themselves show that this is not yet true.
by kbenson | 2026-02-23 00:41:16+00:00
Why would we assume an LLM, even one that doesn't appear to have a bias like that built in, doesn't have one? Just because we can't identify it immediately, does not mean it doesn't exist.

Groups of people can and do have bias, but I also think it's much harder to control the outcome (for better or worse) when inputs are more diverse.
by b00ty4breakfast | 2026-02-23 00:42:31+00:00
as personally identifying information becomes more and more central to modern life, the risk of that info being leaked or stolen becomes even greater. And, given the global nature of the internet, having that info on some server that is connected to the rest of the internet increases that risk further still.

Previously, your local dirty movie theater might ask for ID before selling you tickets to Debbie Does Dallas and they might even keep a copy on file for later reference. Assuming that the underpaid usher didn't just glance at the DOB, that copy likely goes into a filing cabinet in the back of the building. That's not necessarily safe, but the opportunity for that being stolen and sold is minuscule compared to today. Even if it were on a computer database somewhere, the internet of 30-40 years ago, inasmuch as it existed, was not the behemoth that it is today.