MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Ball 2 – Use AI to build fun ball games
by klangdon | 2026-02-19 21:40:37+00:00
I wanted to find a way to get kids:

- moving

- creating

- playing with others

In the end I, and a team of 4 others, built:

- a foam ball with a BLE IMU in it (moving/together)

- an app that allows you to create almost any game you can imagine with AI (creating)

Video of teenagers making a game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7TZXRBybOE

Video that was intended to be for Kickstarter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Edy9zew1XN4 (we abandoned kickstarter, long story)

For hardware we came up with a pretty awesome custom PCB, based around a Dialog DA14531, that doesnt need any charging for over 500 hours of play. The electronics are encased inside 4.5" diameter of foam. We drove a car over it and it didn't break.

For the app, we are using OpenAI Realtime API (gpt-realtime-2025-08-28) to gather the game requirements via conversation. We are using voice/realtime to allow kids to do it without needing to type or read. This piece has a huge dynamic prompt that flows with the conversation. It has about 20 different tools that the agent can use to access sample requirements, ball data, user profiles, api documentation, etc. We also did a lot of work to require younger kids to have adults present and make sure we never saved any pii, etc.

Then we use Gemini 3 Pro to process the conversation and generate a markdown specification/arhictecture of how the game should be designed. We found that Anthropic Opus 4.6 did perform better here, but Gemini 3 Pro is much cheaper and faster. This has a static/cacheable prompt that is primarily a ball api documentation and details on previously seen issues.

Then we use Gemini 3 Pro to also code the game. A very similar prompt to the specification/requirements just different purpose. We are currently exploring condensing the architecture and coding steps into a single step, with new "thinking" models. Also seeing that Google is launching 3.1 model, literally while I type this...

The end result is an app that allows you to speak game requirements, have ai code the game, then you get to play it with a real physical ball.

So ya, tons of fun building all that. Curious what HN thinks. Now the hard part of maybe getting someone to buy it...
by moffkalast | 2026-02-19 21:40:48+00:00
https://arcprize.org/arc-agi/1/

It's a sort of arbitrary pattern matching thing that can't be trained on in the sense that the MMLU can be, but you can definitely generate billions of examples of this kind of task and train on it, and it will not make the model better on any other task. So in that sense, it absolutely can be.

I think it's been harder to solve because it's a visual puzzle, and we know how well today's vision encoders actually work https://arxiv.org/html/2407.06581v1
by sak84 | 2026-02-19 21:40:51+00:00
this resonates hard and exactly what i'm trying to build to solve at elvex.

the missing pieces we are building around are:
- unified auth/permissions across multiple AI providers
- secure data connections without exposing credentials to agents
- audit trails for compliance
- team collaboration (who can deploy what agents where)

the article's right that the tech is ready but the architecture isn't. most companies are duct-taping OpenAI API + LangChain + custom auth + manual governance

elvex gives you the platform layer: multi-provider AI, data integrations, team permissions, workflow orchestration. not saying it's the only option but we're solving the "how do we actually deploy this" problem
by a11ce | 2026-02-19 21:41:04+00:00
This loses the "feature" of being able to write builtins in different languages/operating systems/whatever. Either way, I think a serious version of this would use threads. Concurrency is the real potential benefit imo.

I was getting warnings without that line and don't know how else to fix it (this is my first time using Docker). A PR would be welcome if there's a better way.
by overgard | 2026-02-19 21:41:21+00:00
I find it highly suspect that someone can be a productive developer and find syntax to be a blocker. I've worked professionally in software for 20 years and I've yet to come across a developer I thought was good but kept forgetting what curly braces mean. It's like saying "he's a great writer, but he's illiterate."

I have, incidentally, held the title of "Principal Software Architect", designing distributed systems with kubernetes, and I will say this about architects: if they aren't immersed in the day to day code, they suck at their job. If you're too removed from the constraints you can't be effective at that job. I have however worked with "architects" that refused to get their hands dirty, and it was always miserable.
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2026-02-19 21:41:36+00:00
Guess this is as good an excuse as any.

What are the recommendations for printers now? Bucket it by price range, so $0-200, $200-400, $400-800, $800+

Any notable features which can be a big value add? Offline is obviously a requirement given how the winds are blowing.
by simianwords | 2026-02-19 21:41:43+00:00
incorrect.

> There is no dispute that Meta torrented LibGen and Anna's Archive, but the parties dispute whether and to what extent Meta uploaded (via leeching or seeding) the data it torrented. A Meta engineer involved in the torrenting wrote a script to prevent seeding, but apparently not leeching. See Pls. MSJ at 13; id. Ex. 71 ¶¶ 16–17, 19; id. Ex. 67 at 3, 6–7, 13–16, 24–26; see also Meta MSJ Ex. 38 at 4–5. Therefore, say the plaintiffs, because BitTorrent's default settings allow for leeching, and because Meta did nothing to change those default settings, Meta must have reuploaded “at least some” of the data Meta downloaded via torrent. The plaintiffs assert further that Meta chose not to take any steps to prevent leeching because that would have slowed its download speeds. Meta responds that, even if it reuploaded some of what it downloaded, that doesn't mean it reuploaded any of the plaintiffs’ books. It also notes that leeching was not clearly an issue in the case until recently, and so it has not yet had a chance to fully develop evidence to address the plaintiffs’ assertions.

They did leeching but not seeding. https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-dis-crt-n-d-cal/1174228...

> If I a civilian did this I would face time in prison

no if you had leeched its is very unlikely that you would face time in prison.
by mrighele | 2026-02-19 21:41:56+00:00
Historically the US did care a lot, in a way it reminds me of the Crusade for Freedom [1] and Radio Free Europe [2].

So I find this in line with the behavior of many American administration, the weird thing being that this time the target is not the just usual suspects (China, Iran, etc.) but also European allies.

(not saying this is a good thing btw, just trying to put it in perspective)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusade_for_Freedom

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Europe/Radio_Libert...
Show HN: Mcpsec-A multi-agent SEC gate for MCP toolchains (scan →harden →rescan)
by Yuvraj_exe | 2026-02-19 21:41:57+00:00
Hi HN,

I built MCPSEC, a security gatekeeper for MCP (Model Context Protocol) toolchains.

It scans MCP configs, correlates vulnerability intel (OSV / GHSA / NVD), simulates tool abuse with an LLM-based probe agent, generates a policy + patch plan, applies hardening, then re-scans and gates CI on the final risk score.

The design is intentionally agentic:
- Inventory agent: parses MCP configs
- Intel agent: pulls vuln data (OSV / GHSA / NVD)
- Probe agent (LLM, optional): generates adversarial tool abuse prompts
- Policy agent (LLM, optional): turns findings into concrete config changes
- Orchestrator: merges results, scores risk, writes reports, applies patches

You can run it locally as a CLI or drop it into CI as a GitHub Action:
- It produces before/apply/after reports as artifacts
- It can fail PRs if the final risk score stays above a threshold
- Without an LLM token it works as a deterministic scanner; with one it becomes a true “security copilot”

Repo: https://github.com/yuvrajgitwork/MCP-toolchain-security-GK
Demo workflow: scan → apply → rescan → lower score

I built this because MCP toolchains are becoming powerful and over-privileged very quickly, and there’s basically no security gate for them yet.

Would love feedback from folks working in AI infra / security.
by w10-1 | 2026-02-19 21:41:58+00:00
The title bar of the browser should report how much you've spent in the time frame you select, and the cost of a given article in both absolute and percentage terms.

Along with silly privacy/cookie flags

Then one click you can approve both, or set a policy to auto-approve any site with minimal cookies and less than 0.01%/mo of your budget.

Then ideally when you're done you click red/yellow/green buttons to close the site, indicating whether you were happy with the result. (And set your policy to avoid sites you dissed.)

Then also when you hover over a link you get a pop-up with the same rate and quality info, as text or icons.

It's easy and provable at small to large scales. It just takes coordination.

As motivation, this could enable site-side price discrimination, to maximize revenue. That could drive privacy features...
by KK7NIL | 2026-02-19 21:42:09+00:00
You seem to not even be addressing my point that what you said is objectively false.

You've instead changed the discussion to whether or not those incentives are "effective", which is a very different and subjective discussion.
You also make the dubious assumption that we should halt all destruction of retail clothing when the truth is that a supply surplus is a good thing to prevent supply shocks for consumers and the unused surplus does not necessarily make sense to donate or reuse. So a complete prohibition on the destruction of retail clothing seems like a very blunt tool here.

But, to engage with your new point: I would argue that retail clothing waste is not unique and that a much fairer system would be to tax commercial/industrial waste in general. For that reason, this move by the EU seems more like a publicity stunt than a meaningful measure to me.
by tensor | 2026-02-19 21:42:30+00:00
I think that depends on a lot of factors. E.g. will there be a turn around in the US, and if so how fast? Will Europe and other nations increase science funding to account for all the new talent that wants to come? Will that funding be permanent, not just a one time effort?

Also, if the US restores their democracy and also decides to value science again, will the salaries for scientists abroad compete enough to prevent scientists moving back.

To maintain a sustainable lead the money and investment has to be substantial and long term.
by mothballed | 2026-02-19 21:42:32+00:00
This has nothing to do with the federal laws that are enforced by ATF ... what he did was totally legally federally.

And he didn't sell them, you pulled that out of your ass.

It doesn't appear you have any familiarity with the case yet you purport to understand what the judge was saying by completely mischaracterizing the case with outright falsehoods. But I suppose if you just tell straight up lies confidently enough, someone will believe you!
by beeflet | 2026-02-19 21:42:47+00:00
There should be a new word for the not-exactly-micro-micropayments that the author describes. I suggest "minipayments".

As you, I associate the micropayment idea with truly tiny individual payments. Like paying for bandwidth by megabyte, where each payment is much less than a cent.

The risk of fraud due to any individual payment not being fulfilled is low. At most you loose 0.01c of money, and the vendor loses $ of potential business.
by beloch | 2026-02-19 21:42:49+00:00
There has also been debate about which species of elephant Hannibal's forces used. Elsewhere, Hellenistic Greek forces used Asian elephants, but many believe Hannibal used North African elephants, a sub-species that was extirpated by the Romans. Their proportions might have been a little different than living elephants. It will be interesting to see if the bone can help settle this debate.
Show HN: Embeddable scripting language for Go
by funbitty | 2026-02-19 21:43:00+00:00
Hi! Funxy - a statically typed scripting language that compiles to native binaries and can leverage the entire Go ecosystem.

The main pain points I wanted to solve:

- Quick scripting without sacrificing type safety

- Seamless interop with existing Go packages

- Single-file deployment for tools and automation

What makes it different from other embedded languages:

- Native Go package access (declare deps in config.yaml, get auto-generated bindings)

- BusyBox-style multi-script bundling

- Strong type inference that actually works well

I'd really appreciate technical feedback on:

- The Go interop approach (any edge cases I might have missed?)

- The language design decisions (pipes, pattern matching, etc.)

- Potential use cases I haven't considered

GitHub: https://github.com/funvibe/funxy
by ProjectArcturis | 2026-02-19 21:43:03+00:00
This kind of Level 1 analysis misses what is really going on. "Brain drain" is not really a concern.

There is a tremendous glut of talented biomedical researchers. We have been overproducing them for decades. Even before the cuts, it was incredibly hard to go from a PhD to a tenured professorship. 5-15% would achieve that, depending how you measured.

The cuts have made things worse, but European/RoW funding is even stingier. It's not like there's a firehose of funding drawing away researchers. There may be a few high-profile departures, but the US is still the least-bad place to find research money.

We need to produce fewer PhDs and provide better support for those we do produce.
by Gigachad | 2026-02-19 21:43:22+00:00
It's a misunderstanding of the payment model really. No one watches 150 channels, the pricing is based on you being the average person who watches a subset of them, but it doesn't cost them any extra to provide all of them.

Regular users also don't really like usage based fees which is why every consumer plan has a fixed price rather than paying per use. Cloud storage for example charging you for "up to x gb" rather than "$x per gb".
by dwohnitmok | 2026-02-19 21:43:27+00:00
Not anymore. This benchmark is for LLM chess ability: https://github.com/lightnesscaster/Chess-LLM-Benchmark?tab=r.... LLMs are graded according to FIDE rules so e.g. two illegal moves in a game leads to an immediate loss.

This benchmark doesn't have the latest models from the last two months, but Gemini 3 (with no tools) is already at 1750 - 1800 FIDE, which is approximately probably around 1900 - 2000 USCF (about USCF expert level). This is enough to beat almost everyone at your local chess club.
by mikestorrent | 2026-02-19 21:43:30+00:00
This is something that bothers me. We had a beautiful trend on the Web of the browser also being the debugger - from View Source decades ago all the way up to the modern browser console inspired by Firebug. Everything was visible, under the hood, if you cared to look. Now, a lot of "thinking" is taking place under a shroud, and only so much of it can be expanded for visibility and insight into the process. Where is the option to see the entire prompt that my agent compiled and sent off, raw? Where's the option to see the output, replete with thinking blocks and other markup?
by tehjoker | 2026-02-19 21:43:58+00:00
I understand that the government is now too coarse to use soft power, and maybe it wasn't even working as well as it used to, but it is bizarre to undercut the sciences when their military capability is derived almost entirely from high technology since they can't field or lose lots of soldiers. I get they want to be Rome 3.0 or some bullshit, but Rome was famous for investing in engineering.

A bunch of dunces.

Or perhaps they are so far up their own assholes that they think AI is going to do research by itself with no funding from now on.

Ironically enough, the guy that coined the term "soft power" recently died. He did his doctorate with Henry Kissinger.
by 0x457 | 2026-02-19 21:44:39+00:00
> I think you are underselling your city here. LA has an excellent bus system which can be improved further still. LA also has the potential of installing a world class bicycle infrastructure, and me personally I am fairly optimistic that sometime in the near future, your city will put my city of Seattle to shame with your bike network.

No really, insanity that usually happens inside a bus in LA aside, it still goes on the same congested roads. "Bus Only" becomes a suggestion once rush hour starts (I can see bus only line backed up by not buses every day our of my window).

I mostly use metro because buses not worth it for me. Metro network is either wonderful stops or very bad stops. There is a massive "cleanup" attempt before the Olympics. Some will be right where you want to go and some are in the middle of a freeway 20 minutes of walking away from anything.

The fact that K line does not go through Getty Center to please a handful of people and car brains saddens me.

> LA also has the potential of installing a world class bicycle infrastructure

Please no. Cyclists are probably the most hated category on the road even by other cyclists. I'd ban cycling on public roads in most of LA if it were up to me.
by lukev | 2026-02-19 21:44:51+00:00
Frankly I'm tired of metaphor-based attempts to explain LLMs.

Stochastic Parrots. Interns. Junior Devs. Thought partners. Bicycles for the mind. Spicy autocomplete. A blurry jpeg of the web. Calculators but for words. Copilot. The term "artificial intelligence" itself.

These may correspond to a greater or lesser degree with what LLMs are capable of, but if we stick to metaphors as our primary tool for reasoning about these machines, we're hamstringing ourselves and making it impossible to reason about the frontier of capabilities, or resolve disagreements about them.

A understanding-without-metaphors isn't easy -- it requires a grasp of math, computer science, linguistics and philosophy.

But if we're going to move forward instead of just finding slightly more useful tropes, we have to do it. Or at least to try.
by xnyan | 2026-02-19 21:45:02+00:00
> Thing is you can make a 3d printer; it's basically CNC stuff with a different tool.

Yes, but no too. I've built and purchased many 3d printers. You can make a 3d printer, but can you make one that works reliably as something like a washing machine with little to no tinkering or adjustment? Bambu Lab can sell you that for less than three hundred bucks. Just give it a file, feed it plastic, and it will rip.

I can now build a 3d printer that reliable, but only with parts and tools from other people and only after experience. Realistically not being able to buy a 3d printer off the shelf means it's going to be inaccessible for most people.
by greygoo222 | 2026-02-19 21:45:06+00:00
This mostly can't explain the fact that mortality is also rising in under 50s. It is true mortality is rising less than incident, and that a small proportion instances of mortality could be deaths related to reasonable risks taken on from treatment side effects (to make up numbers, it makes sense to take a 5% chance of dying from treatment this year over a 80% chance of dying from cancer in 5 years), but this is probably not the whole effect. Something is causing more CRC in people under 50.
by WillAdams | 2026-02-19 21:45:09+00:00
1st Amendment + 2nd Amendment == The Right to 3D Print and Bear Arms

Moreover, how could this be implemented? Determining the 3D volume which a given G-code file will result in is something which the industry would find very useful, but no one has yet achieved. Doing so would probably simultaneously result in the folks doing so being awarded a Fields Medal and the Turing Award (in addition to making a boatload of money licensing the resultant software/patent).

On top of that, how does one resolve the matter of the same G-code file (for two nested circles plus come machine-specific codes) resulting in either a metal washer, or a lamp base, depending on whether run on a machine set to metric w/ a coolant system, or Imperial w/ a tool changer?

Lastly, who creates the list of forbidden parts? How will it be curated? And most importantly, how will it be secured that it isn't a set of blueprints which are then used to make firearms?

A more reasonable bit of legislation would be one which required folks who are barred by statute from owning firearms (convicted felons/convicted of misdemeanor domestic abuse) to approve with their parole officer any file for a part/object made by a 3D printer or CNC machine before submitting it to the machine.
by diath | 2026-02-19 21:45:44+00:00
There's a blog post from Google about this topic as well where they found that inserting bound checking into standard library functions (in this case C++) had a mere 0.3% negative performance impact on their services: https://security.googleblog.com/2024/11/retrofitting-spatial...

For people using Clang you can read more about libc++ hardening at https://libcxx.llvm.org/Hardening.html
by xlerb | 2026-02-19 21:45:52+00:00
LLMs aren’t built around truth as a first-class primitive. They optimize for next-token probability and human approval, not factual verification.

That doesn’t mean they can’t produce accurate information, but it does mean factuality is emergent and contingent, not enforced by architecture.

If we’re going to treat them as coworkers or exoskeletons, we should be clear about that distinction.

( ^ written by ChatGPT 5.2 )
by simonstaton | 2026-02-19 21:45:57+00:00
Okay I will try to answer this my best, I'm a principal software engineer with 17+ years experience at companies like Google. I've yet to find an agent orchestration harness that operates quite like what I've built here.

Why is this different to all the other garbage? I've built the message bus from graph theory allowing operators to see the entire topology for optimal orchestration. Also having this boot from a cold start in the cloud makes it accessible from anywhere. I've also built an agent persistence system so that sessions are persisted across server restarts and if the server is shut down all agents will recover.

The update today has shipped billing so you can see how much each agent is costing along with a graph view to see the entire swarm and better scaling for performance.

The next release will be horizontal scaling and moving the message bus out of memory to accomplish that. What I can tell you is this 2 day old project was the continuation of 2 months of my work.
by boplicity | 2026-02-19 21:45:57+00:00
You know who isn't arguing for micropayments for news articles?

Pretty much every damn publisher.

Nobody who wants to build a stable business would want to depend on micropayments.

Such a system would be a race to the bottom, just like garnering "Facebook likes" and similar "virality" is a failing proposition. (And look at what happened to companies like Buzzfeed, who were focused on just this.)

We have a huge problem in our society, of people not valuing journalism, and not wanting to pay for it. Here on HN you regularly see people attempt to actively subvert copyright (by linking to "archive sites"), in addition to the constant drip of criticism when publishers do things to try to build their business, such as collect email addresses, use paywalls, etc.

Publishers need reliable, stable, income, not the lottery type system that would come from micropayments. They need to be paid to do journalism, not write articles that convince people to spend "coins" on them.

Fortunately, publishers are actually figuring out how to build stable businesses. There's still a lot of work to do, especially in terms of local journalism, but it's clear that there is no future for micropayments, based on what seems to actually work.

And please, I beg you, set aside a budget to support journalists, and spend it.