MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hirvi74 | 2026-02-24 17:22:59+00:00
> absolutely zero chance of the 50th percentile IQ becoming a world class mathematician.

Good, we don't need billions of them anyway.

I wish modern society would quit focusing on individual intelligence over collective intelligence. We can take something like the microprocessor, for example. The smart group that designed the microprocessor was not the same group that designed the software nor the group the built the parts nor the group the assembled the device. However, every group is equally important.
by dathinab | 2026-02-24 17:23:06+00:00
Bold strategy :)

I don't think this was their "strategy", but more like a "young people are sometimes clueless and fail to take care of necessary things with enough buffer ahead of time" situations.

And that (student + exchange program + in general eligible for a visa) is why it turned out well. Not sure if it still would do so today. The "cheap yen" tourism boom might have brought in money, but also a lot of annoyance with unpleasant tourists amplified by how modern recommendation algorithms work (you see all the rage bait "a tourist behaved mean" and non "normal tourist is polite and does nothing strange") and various propaganda amplifying this. In general there seem to be a ton of "make cities look way worse wrt. safety and cleanliness and blame it on tourists/immigrants/minorities" videos across most western countries in recent times (not just JP, e.g. London has a lot of such nonsense, it's quite safe, but if you ask ticktock it's a lawless crime zone. ).
by adamzwasserman | 2026-02-24 17:23:11+00:00
The interesting version of the argument isn't about substrate: it's about motivation.

Present the trolley problem to GPT-4 and it gives you a philosophy survey answer.

Present it to a human and their palms sweat. The gap isn't computation, it's that humans are value-making machines shaped by millions of years of selection pressure.

Pollan lands on the wrong argument (biology vs. silicon) when the real one is: where do the values come from, and can they emerge without a reproductive lineage that stakes survival on getting them right?
by areddyfd | 2026-02-24 17:23:24+00:00
How we think about it? It asks clarifying questions before generating anything. It explains every step, what it’s doing and why. It keeps humans in control of execution.

Counterintuitive truth is that users trust it more when it slows down.

Now the hard part, how do you design friction that feels like safety, not bureaucracy?

Still figuring it out. Anyone else wrestling with this?
by PEGHIN | 2026-02-24 17:23:35+00:00
Hey HN! I built AgentGate, an open-source security firewall for AI agents built on OpenClaw.

The problem: AI agents (browser, bash, fetch) can call any tool without restriction. There's no built-in way to define policies like "agents can read files but not delete them" or "require human approval before sending emails."

AgentGate solves this with a policy evaluation layer that wraps your OpenClaw tool calls and enforces ALLOW/DENY/REQUIRE_APPROVAL rules in real time.

How it works:
1. You define policies in Firebase Firestore (regex-matched against tool name + args)
2. Every tool call hits the AgentGate middleware before execution
3. ALLOW → passes through, DENY → blocked immediately, REQUIRE_APPROVAL → Telegram webhook fires, human approves/rejects in real time
4. Full audit log stored in Firestore with timestamps, agent ID, tool called, decision, and approver

Stack: Next.js dashboard, Firebase Firestore + Auth, OpenClaw bash/browser/fetch agents, Telegram Bot API for approval notifications.

What's working in v1.0.0:
- Policy engine (ALLOW/DENY/REQUIRE_APPROVAL)
- Real-time audit log dashboard
- AI Policy Wizard (describe a rule in English → generates the regex policy)
- Telegram approval flow
- Tested against OpenClaw bash, browser, and fetch tool types

Would love feedback on the policy model, the approval UX, and whether this is useful for teams running autonomous agents in production.

GitHub + docs: https://https://agent-gate-rho.vercel.app/
by MisterTea | 2026-02-24 17:23:36+00:00
Some things are more costly in the USA. I have a soft spot for the aesthetics of the Fuji Electric Command Switches AR16, AF16. They're like $19+ each in the USA from automationdirect.com. However, in 2024 I found a stall in Akihabara selling Industrial automation stuff including the Fuji switches for 5-10 bucks each. Bought a bunch and made a little demo panel for about 60 bucks. The same items in the USA would have set me back over $150. When I go back I am buying a lot more.
by opal_tob | 2026-02-24 17:23:39+00:00
The article wasn't talking specifically about strongMan at that point, and not all data encrypted is highly-structured. For instance, AES keys used to encrypt large files might be protected by a password-derived key to allow password changes without re-encrypting the entire file. Or an ssh key manager might store a bunch of ed25519 secret keys, which are uniform random.

The case pointed out in the article-- strongMan-- definitely didn't deal with uniform random data, which is why the encryption was broken, not brittle. But if you DO have a bunch of uniform random keys encrypted using CTR mode with the same key and IV, the XOR of any two of them won't tell you much, because the XOR of random values is random.

However, if any of those encrypted keys wind up compromised, it's game over for ALL the keys. Not broken, but definitely brittle.

I understand not loving GCM or GCM-SIV; they definitely aren't perfect. I also agree that CTR+HMAC is just fine in a lot of situations, especially if you're careful enough to derive separate HMAC keys and encryption keys. CTR+HMAC also has the advantage of being key-committing, which gives me the warm fuzzies.

Still, GCM and GCM-SIV have their use cases, especially in performance-sensitive situations. Given the widespread adoption of AEAD modes, I think failing to include GCM in an AES implementation is an indicator that a library is out of date and ought to be treated with caution.
by simianwords | 2026-02-24 17:24:08+00:00
This comment naively believes in zero sum creation of wealth.

Wealth is not taken from our consumers and given to Sam Altman. Sam and his company are creating wealth - increasing the pie.

Of course it benefits everyone while also benefiting them.

Wealth need not be redistributed to improve lives. Just the mere invention of ChatGPT and letting people purchase it and use it is enough to improve people’s lives. Redistribution does not solve any poverty problem other than transfer power.

Sam redistributing money will not sustainably change anything about prosperity or poverty.
by bubblewand | 2026-02-24 17:25:06+00:00
Yeah, my semi-informed WAG for the core cause of many of the ills of our current situation is that we're wildly over-capitalized. The "trickle down" focus to put more of the "pie" on the investment side (setting aside whether the "trickle down" effect itself was meaningfully real, not relevant to this "take") was probably barely justified at the time, if at all, and we've just kept shoveling more fuel into that fire in the decades since.

You can't have demand without spreading buying power around. If you just keep shifting toward investment, that capital gets up to some really stupid shit because there's not enough demand to provide anything useful for it to do. Build a factory? Why would I do that, the returns are terrible. No, I'll "invest" in bitcoin... or do an NFT startup... or reserve way more memory capacity than I'll plausibly need just to fuck with my competition, in ways and in an environment that's so bubbly that this activity likely won't provoke capacity build-out to compensate...

We really, really needed some capital (by which I just mean investor-money, not real productive assets) destruction in the '08 crisis, and we didn't get it.
by vaxman | 2026-02-24 17:25:07+00:00
At the outset of the fastest increase in interest rates in 40 years, Fed Chairman Powell explicitly stated that the Fed would not mind seeing what he viewed as inflated home prices fall substantially.

While there are other initiatives underway to make purchasing homes more affordable, they likely won't come to fruition before supply reaches a tipping point that causes rapid and sustained downward pressure on home prices. People buying now could be trying to catch a falling knife and end up owing more than their homes are worth.
by tannhaeuser | 2026-02-24 17:25:08+00:00
The term "AI" has changed in recent years but if you mean classic game logic such as complex rules and combinatorial opponents then there's plenty of Prolog game code on github eg. for Poker and other card or board games. Prolog is also as natural a choice for adventure puzzles as it gets with repository items and complicated conditions to advance the game. In fact, Amzi! Prolog uses adventure game coding as a topic for its classic (1980s) introductory Prolog learning book Adventure in Prolog ([1]). Based on a cursory look, most code in that book should run just fine on a modern ISO Prolog engine ([2]) in your browser.

[1]: https://www.amzi.com/AdventureInProlog/advtop.php

[2]: https://quantumprolog.sgml.net
by dhosek | 2026-02-24 17:25:36+00:00
Back when SIM cards were relatively new (and credit-card sized) ca 1997 or so, the vision was that you would plug your SIM card into a landline phone to be able to make/receive calls there. I was working for Motorola at the time and I remember coming up with a couple ideas that I never shared with anyone because I didn’t know who/how.

The first was essentially the iPhone but with a palm pilot type touch screen, the other was a PCMCIA card (which were also much larger back then) that you could put your SIM card into and plug into your laptop to be able to make calls or send/receive faxes on the computer.
by evilpie | 2026-02-24 17:25:58+00:00
You aren't reading it right.

new Sanitizer({})

This Sanitizer will allow everything by default, but setHTML will still block elements/attributes that can lead to XSS.

You might want something like:

new Sanitizer({ replaceWithChildrenElements: ["h1"], elements: [], attributes: [] })

This will replace <h1> elements with their children (i.e. text in this case), but disallow all other elements and attributes.
by ghaff | 2026-02-24 17:26:27+00:00
Permanent losses are pretty uncommon in general. Good for them for minimizing but having bags on the next flight or delayed for a couple/three days is way more common. Probably would have to be stolen which is rare, especially in Japan, I assume or end up in some weird location without a scan.

Was flying into Narita once and I had checked luggage in part because I was carrying an award for a Japanese customer. I was sort of given a "we'll get back to you sooner or later." At which point I explained the situation to a supervisor I think and was much fluttering around and got the bag the next day.
by okanat | 2026-02-24 17:26:44+00:00
Non-system programmers like to trivialize choices of system programmers yet again. .NET is a GC platform running on a virtual machine. Bytecode compatibility and absolute performance are not that big of a deal on such platforms. You cannot / shouldn't run .NET on deeply embedded systems and bare metal where You want to strip as much standard library as possible and want as little magic in standard library as possible. In a language with big hosted system assumption this causes to runtime to be split and forces developers to define big API boundaries.

The use case of languages like Rust and C++ is that you can use the same compiler to write both bare-metal unhosted code (non-std for bootloaders, microcontrollers and kernels) and hosted code (uses std structures). As a system programmer that crosses the edge between two environments, I would like to share as much code as possible. Having a big standard library with hosted system assumption is a huge issue. In those cases you want the language works 99% the same and can use the same structs / libraries. Sometimes you also want to write non-std code on hosted environments for things like linkers.

Rust isn't even at the level of maturity of C yet in this regard. Rust's std / core is too big for really memory limited microcontrollers (<64 K space) and requires nasty hacks with weak ABI symbols to make things sane.

Having a huge baggage of std both causes issues like this for the users and also increases maintenance burden of the maintainers. Rust really wants to break its APIs as little as possible and small standard library is a great way to achieve that. C++ suffered a lot from this and it hampered its adoption for C codebases.
by kldg | 2026-02-24 17:27:20+00:00
This has been my experience, too. In dealing with hardware, I'm particularly pleased with how vision models are shaping up; it's able to identify what I've photographed, put it in a simple text list, and link me to appropriate datasheets. yday, it even figured out how I wanted to reverse engineer a remote display board for a just-released inverter and correctly identified which pin of which unfamiliar Chinese chip was spitting out the serial data I was interested in; all I actually asked for was chip IDs with a quick vague note on what I was doing. It doesn't help me solder faster, but it gets me to soldering faster.

A bit OT, but I would love to see some different methods of calculating economic productivity. After looking into how BLS calculates software productivity, I quit giving weight to the number altogether and it left me feeling a bit blue; they apply a deflator in part by considering the value of features (which they claim to be able to estimate by comparing feature sets and prices in a select basket of items of a category, applying coefficients based on differences); it'll likely never actually capture what's going on in AI unless Adobe decides to add a hundred new buttons "because it's so quick and easy to do." Their methodology requires ignoring FOSS (except for certain corporate own-account cases), too; if everyone switched from Microsoft365 to LibreOffice, US productivity as measured by BLS would crash.

BLS lays methodology out in a FAQ page on "Hedonic Quality Adjustment"[1], which covers hardware instead of software, but software becomes more reliant on these "what does the consumer pay" guesses at value (what is the value of S-Video input on your TV? significantly more than supporting picture-in-picture, at least in 2020).

[1] https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/questions-and-ans...
by ezst | 2026-02-24 17:27:20+00:00
Stop calling LLMs AI. We have LLMs as a product, now, but not AI. AI does exist as a research field, and so do "flying cars" and "nuclear fusion" (with arguably those two being much closer to materiality than AI).

And no, that doesn't make me some kind of "AI hater", or someone unable to see value in LLMs.
by dreadsword | 2026-02-24 17:27:39+00:00
I share your opinons! And, I have an EV - its a wonderfully utilitarian, fantastically reliable, incredibly cheap transportation device. But its a passion-inducing as driving a golf cart - all utility, no drama, no experience.

I don't think Lamborghini etc will close up - I think they'll just get more and more expensive as ICE engines get penalized in more markets.
by MrTravisB | 2026-02-24 17:27:39+00:00
We completely agree. Framework fatigue is real, and getting locked into a rigid loop is frustrating.

Choices are great, and our goal is to let you piece together a setup to your own liking. We want Pilo to work with your existing tools, not against them. If you just want to rip out our accessibility tree compression pipeline and use it as a standalone skill in your own custom framework, we consider that a massive win.

That is exactly why we are open sourcing it. We want to see what others can do with it.

If there is a framework or tool this could work with but does not currently, we would love to hear about it.
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-02-24 17:27:49+00:00
Have you looked at Motorola? I'm not sure they have all of those features, but me and you think similarly and when I did research, I ended up choosing their $130 phone for my contractors.

But I main the $900 pixel.

They are so similar its weird, but Motorola was slow with snapchat and the keyboard some time.
by rlpb | 2026-02-24 17:28:23+00:00
Even then, they would still need to rebuild massive amounts on updates. That is nice in theory, but see the number of bugs reported in Debian because upstream projects fail to rebuild as expected. "I don't have the exact micro version of this dependency I'm expecting" is one common reason, but there are many others. It's a pretty regular thing, and therefore would be burdensome to distro maintainers."
by thewebguyd | 2026-02-24 17:28:24+00:00
My assumption is that Apple has a better contract with Qualcomm, being their biggest customer (for now, until they completely move over to their custom modems). Apple probably also has been abstracting the firmware from the start inside iOS, while Android didn't until project treble.

Samsung & Pixel are now offering 7 years of updates for flagships, so it would seem it's no longer a hardware/support limitation and purely a financial decision by other android manufacturers, and by Samsung for their non S-series of phones.

TL;DR OEMs are deliberately choosing to not support their devices, not due to any limitations anymore (thanks to project treble).
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-02-24 17:28:25+00:00
That's a hypothesis. If we knew that for certain, it would be really big news; and we could investigate to learn why, and then we could isolate the causative factors and perhaps find other ways of deploying them… If you know something the rest of us don't, prove it: show us the evidence, show us the specific hypotheses, describe a repeatable experiment, show us the results if such an experiment has been performed.

If you don't know something the rest of us don't, don't be so arrogant about your pet theories. Such arrogance costs lives.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-24 17:28:39+00:00
LD 2164 Tracker: https://legislature.maine.gov/billtracker/#Paper/2164?legisl...

LD 2164 Bill: https://legislature.maine.gov/backend/App/services/getDocume...

Housing study: https://mainehousing.org/docs/default-source/default-documen...

Related:

More [Maine] schools have closed in Maine thus far in 2025 than all of 2024 - https://www.nepm.org/2025-07-01/more-schools-have-closed-in-... - July 1st, 2025
by nine_k | 2026-02-24 17:28:42+00:00
If forced partition of a building were the primary goal, that goal could be achieved without badges. Or, at least, without having to badge into every door. Just have locks on every door that are normally disengaged, but which can be locked remotely and promptly.

(While at it, I once worked on an access control system. It was aeons ago; the system ran under OS/2. We installed it on a factory. It worked well, until we ran it in demo mode under production load, that is, the stream of morning shift turnstile registration events. The DB melted. I solved the problem trivially: I noticed that the DB was installed on a FAT volume for unknown reasons, so I moved it to an HPFS volume, and increased the RAM cache for the disk to maximum. Everything worked without a hitch then.)
by professoretc | 2026-02-24 17:28:48+00:00
> On a phone keyboard, sure, it's as hard as an accent sign (á, for example), difficult but not twrrible. But on a keyboard? Yeah, no one is typing in Alt combos when literally any other construction will do.

For me, --- gets converted to an em-dash (—) while typing, if I have my input method (ELatin) enabled. I'm so used to typing in while working in LaTeX I can easily slip it in elsewhere.
by bdangubic | 2026-02-24 17:29:13+00:00
> It's not so much that it's hard, it's that it has a lower return on investment, because the IRS gets money from finding mistakes or intentional fraud....

Isn't this exactly what all megacorps are hoping for everyone thinks? I am not saying that you are wrong but these megacorps are some of the most evil the Civilization has ever seen (see Meta) and now you and I are hired as tax attorneys - pretty soon (if not right away) one of us will go "this shit's very much so illegal but who is actually going to audit us? - the answer, per your comment is basically no one because we think these megacorps and their lawyers are there to play by the book...
by toast0 | 2026-02-24 17:29:16+00:00
When I was an employee of a subsidiary of Infospace, my RSUs were always worthless (honestly, I don't remember if any vested while I was there), at Yahoo, we could generally trade, although one shouldn't trade immediately after earnings, but I don't remember if this was enforced at the affiliated brokerage. At Facebook, I think it was typically a three week window every quarter.

Of course, if you quit, the windows are no longer in force, although if you have material non-public information, you're still not allowed to trade. Maybe there'a a share price where you'd rather quit and sell than hold on until the window opens.
Ask HN: Why do task apps fail at task initiation?
by gbessoni | 2026-02-24 17:29:34+00:00
I’ve noticed many task apps are good at planning, but still weak at helping people actually start.

I dug through Reddit threads on ADHD/executive dysfunction and kept seeing the same pattern: people don’t need more organization features — they need lower friction to begin the first step.

So I built a voice-first task app around that idea:
- quick voice capture instead of typing
- one-task-at-a-time flow
- built-in timer to force a start

I’m curious from the HN crowd:
1. Why do you think most task apps fail at initiation?
2. What interaction patterns actually help you start?
3. What would you test first in a product like this?

If you want, I can share what patterns I extracted from Reddit and what I’m measuring now.
by the42thdoctor | 2026-02-24 17:29:37+00:00
I’ve always been an expert at negotiating with myself to skip a workout. To fix this, I built FitVow: a system where I lock real money into a smart contract, and if I miss my weekly goals, I get fined.

The engineering challenge was: How do I prevent my future, lazy self from lying to the contract?

I tried to solve this by anchoring trust in three places:

1. Hardware-backed Proofs: The Android app reads from Health Connect (Galaxy Watch data) and signs a summary using a non-exportable key in the phone's TEE (Trusted Execution Environment). The smart contract verifies this signature on-chain.

2. Amnesiac APK Signing: To prevent myself from just "updating" the app to a version that fakes data, I sign the release with an ephemeral key and permanently delete the keystore. Since Android identity is tied to the signing key, I can’t overwrite the app without losing the hardware keys, which triggers an expensive on-chain penalty.

3. Permissionless Enforcement: The contract is "ownerless" regarding enforcement. If I fail a week, anyone can trigger the penalty function. The enforcer gets a small bounty, and the rest goes to charity (Giveth).

This is currently a 12-week experiment with ~$235 at stake. It’s not a product—it's a system design puzzle to see if I can make cheating more effort than just doing the workout.

Live Dashboard: http://fitvow.pedroaugusto.dev/

Source Code: https://github.com/pedrooaugusto/fitness-unbreakable-vow/

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the security model—especially how you’d try to 'break' the vow without actually exercising.