MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gaoshan | 2026-02-24 18:23:25+00:00
This comment really resonates with me (I’m old now, for context). I was put in the gifted program, but the truth is I wasn’t very good at math while I was wildly strong in language. I was a pretty solitary kid who read a lot of quality literature and was endlessly curious about the world. I ended up getting kicked out of the program early in elementary school for being "immature," but the gifted label stuck and I kept hearing how smart I was.

By high school, I was a 1.4 GPA student who was also on the Academic Decathlon team winning state-level medals. My upbringing was extremely abusive, which definitely contributed to the academic problems, but what I really needed was someone in my corner pushing me to explore and actually try. Being told I was smart wasn’t just useless, it was actively harmful. I became afraid to try and leaned on what came naturally (hence doing well on Decathlon tests) while consistently failing to finish things (no homework, no papers... and the GPA shows it).

What would have made a huge difference for me was being explicitly taught how and why to study, how to take and review notes, and how to manage my time. And just as importantly, someone consistently emphasizing that effort matters a lot more than being "smart."

Even now, I’m honestly surprised by how many people I work with in tech equate being "smart" with being good at math, algorithms, or pattern recognition, while seeming almost oblivious to some pretty big gaps in other areas. That mindset isn’t doing anyone any favors.
by regus | 2026-02-24 18:23:36+00:00
When I was a kid I sent a letter to Snapple telling them that they should make Snapple flavored popsicles. They sent me a nice letter telling me it was a good idea. I have not thought about it since. But I wonder if my letter directly lead to this disaster:

"Disaster on a stick
An attempt to erect the world’s largest popsicle in a city square ended with a scene straight out of a disaster film — but much stickier."

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna8321110
by CivBase | 2026-02-24 18:23:38+00:00
The bigger shame is that it took Peter Theil's name to get people's outraged about this. Discord handed over their users' identifications to a third party without regard for how it would be used or secured. I don't care if it was backed by Peter Theil or Mother Theresa - it's a huge problem either way.

And they'll do it again too. They'll find a new partner - one with less baggage - to do the exact same thing and few people will bat an eye.
by mdavid626 | 2026-02-24 18:23:44+00:00
I feel the same way. Once I worked with junior developer, who was really eager to develop stuff. He was tasked to create a development environment, where we can tests features. Nothing fancy, just some scripts and simple containers.

He used copies of the production database, but forgot to set the admin password. The machine in ec2, public on the internet.

It was fixed few weeks later. But the connection still doesn’t use SSL, sends passwords plain text.

Yeah, he doesn’t really like criticism about his work…

I always think about the phrase:

“Security is our highest priority”

Sure.
by zephen | 2026-02-24 18:23:49+00:00
Security is a series of trade-offs, which in the worst case disallows anybody from doing anything.

In the simplest case, if a person has two different sets of systems they desire to access from a cellphone, and an unwillingness to carry two different cellphones around with them, then it becomes a business decision of whether that person is valuable and trustworthy enough to allow access to work systems and "other" systems from that cellphone.

Who pays for the cellphone, and whether this extends to laptops or not, are questions of degree.
by bogzz | 2026-02-24 18:23:51+00:00
Funny is subjective, I should just have moved on and ignored this but I couldn't help myself, this is so irritating.

It's a prompt that makes an LLM turn iuqefxygn9urg0fh1 into a little Godot game. It's like a slot machine with no payoff, and the dog component is slapped on top of it and makes no difference whatsoever in the project.
by dijit | 2026-02-24 18:24:36+00:00
I always found that compliance issue with encrypted drives a bit funny.

The provider has the keys.

So, the drives encryption has no practical application.

The drives in, say, GCP aren't even real drives, the blocks are chunked over a distributed pool of storage- you can't just grab a drive and walk away with an OS or a data volume, you'd just get random junk. - So what's the encryption going to do?

I guess it's harder to attach your drive to someone elses VM, but ultimately since the provider has the key it doesn't actually change anything there either, except that you need another API call to launch a drive and maybe there's different permissions on your drives key than on the drive itself?

idk, feels like a weird theatre that the providers get away with because they're so big; there's no practical way of even checking if they're following up with drive encryption either. So it really is "here you can input a secret key, that you choose, we promise to use it *wink*".

Totally absent any verifiable outcome, or actual threat model.
by sarchertech | 2026-02-24 18:24:39+00:00
>Yeah. Anyway, porn, cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs were very accessible to me despite being a good kid with parents who cared in a world where those were all legally forbidden to me.

Were they accessible to you, or do you just think they were accessible to you? How many of these teenagers who would let you try a cigarette would have been willing to keep supplying you cigarettes regularly. How many would have been willing to keep buying you alcohol?

>All this talk of “glimpses” is you trying to read too deep into a single example.

No, it's glimpses, because it's about at the very least semi-regular access, not preventing every single child from having tiny amounts of alcohol. Look at my reply the other poster in this thread. There are dozens of studies that show conclusively that minimum age drinking laws reduce alcohol use among children, and reduce alcoholism later in life.

>I’m saying requiring ID for access wasn’t effective before

But yes it was effective. Read the studies. Minimum age drinking laws have been shown almost universally to be effective. Not at stopping every child from drinking but at harm reduction.

>I’m using my adult mind to recognize that if I had been motivated as a kid, there are additional ways I. as a kid, would have been able to figure out how to get it.

The level an effort an 8 year old would have to go through to get regular access to cigarettes and alcohol in the US, would require an enormous level of motivation which almost no 8 year old has, and it would be outright impossible to do without a semi-observant parent noticing.

That's the whole point of making it hard to do.

It takes much less effort for a kid to walk to the library and check out a hardcore porn DVD than it does for him to convince an 18 year old to buy one for him. Most kids just aren't going to go through the hassle of doing the latter, but they'd do the former in a heartbeat. All things being equal, greater motivation is required to overcome greater obstacles.
by zelphirkalt | 2026-02-24 18:24:44+00:00
On one hand I agree, since I see way too many dispassionate people working in this profession, on the other hand this requires businesses to understand, that a software developer is more than a code monkey. I am not sure we are heading there. Currently, it seems more like many non-IT people think that their monkey imitations are the same that software developers have been doing for years and that they now don't need any good developers any longer. For some CRUD businesses this might even be true.
by conformist | 2026-02-24 18:24:45+00:00
I was in a similar situation as the parent post and skipped/was moved up by two years of high school.

I think it was very beneficial to have to work hard to catch up with more advanced classes. I feel flexibility around this is something parents and schools should take seriously.

(Tbf I was also super lucky to find a very accepting group of nerdy friends in the new year that would tolerate someone younger.)
by advisedwang | 2026-02-24 18:24:58+00:00
> Devising a new schema based on SQLite would allow for current features that are being jerry-rigged into the attributes to have their own real place in the database

Perfectly possible with XML too

> An SQLite based store is one of the most tested and optimal formats for document and application storage

It's optimized for things that largely don't matter for password storage. The testing is admirable, but there's no issue of keepass clients crashing or corrupting data so again, not very relevant (probably because of low concurrency, simple writes etc).

> A switch this big is a major chance to fix the governance structure and align it more with a democratic consortium than a benevolent-dictator-for-life style of project management

You don't need a technical change to solve this. In fact, a fork that would fracture clients is the last thing you need when making governance changes.

> So many quality of life features can be added where the old schema disallowed it

All of the features they list can be achieved with an XML format. The format isn't what's holding them back.
by yndoendo | 2026-02-24 18:25:16+00:00
No luck needed.

Linux based phones are starting to become viable as daily drivers. [0] They are even coming with VM Android in case an application is needed that does not have a Linux equivalent.

I am interested in how Google's gatekeeper tactics are going to affect Android like platforms such as /e/os and GrapheneOS. [1]

[0] http://furilabs.com/

[1] https://murena.com/america/products/smartphones/
Spacydo: State machine example with own calldata for state transition rules
by tracyspacy | 2026-02-24 18:25:16+00:00
In this example Traffic Light task is a simple state machine which has it's own state transition rules in calldata that executes by vm on each task's instructions call.

VM has persistent storage, so state is persistent across calls

Calldata logic: check task's state -> transit to next -> save. State transition rule: 0(Green)->1(Yellow)->2(Red)->0(Green).

examples code: https://github.com/tracyspacy/spacydo/blob/main/examples/traffic_light
by hellojesus | 2026-02-24 18:25:18+00:00
It's as easy as parents keeping the default router password, a kid logging in and then setting up port forwarding to a device on a port that they're running a server on, tied to their current residential ip, and then pinging their friends that ip and allowing them all to connect and download whatever files or upload whatever files. The peer-to-peer network could really start establishing itself in ephemeral and very hard to track ways. All you need is one kid with access to a vpn to torrent without copyright concerns to seed the network. Or one kid to get its parents to buy a domain and use that as an anchor so that the dns to ip is set behind the scenes for the peers.
by jyoung8607 | 2026-02-24 18:25:19+00:00
Typo squatting is a thing, and so are Unicode homographs.

The permissions approach isn't bad. I may trust Thunderbird for some things, but permission to read SMS and notifications is permission to bypass SMS 2FA for every other account using that phone number. It deserves a special gate that's very hard for a scammer to pass. The exact nature of the gate can be reasonably debated.
by toraway | 2026-02-24 18:25:39+00:00
Latin/Greek were considered part of the core curriculum for a well-rounded classical education in the upper-class for hundreds of years (some degree of retained proficiency wasn't unusual in graduates of the elite schools in Britain even through the mid 20th century). Not spoken as a primary language, sure, but far from "dead" in education.

Latin was required for philosophy, law, rhetoric, and the classics. Greek skewing more towards the sciences, logic and also philosophy. One would be constantly encounter Latin/Greek in their materials and not just as a obtuse code to memorize like how a modern biology student typically views e.g. binomial nomenclature today.

So when viewed through the 21st century lens of English dominance throughout education, it loses the context that makes it much more understandable why and how a young student, especially a precocious one, would pick up those languages specifically in the course of their tutoring, reading, etc. (And not as some kind of genius parlor trick as modern retellings tend to portray it).
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-02-24 18:25:51+00:00
I remember seeing some new licenses like Human license or something iirc but they all had the valid criticism that it would be unenforcable or hard to catch decision.

I haven't looked at the project that much but this could seem exciting to me if maybe these two things can get merged.

I don't think that license is necessarily the problem in here. Licenses can change and people can adopt new licenses.
Show HN: Shelfctl – PDF/ePub library manager backed by GitHub Release
by daynablackwell | 2026-02-24 18:25:56+00:00
Once PDFs land in git history, every clone carries them forever - even after you delete the files. GitHub's 100MB per-file limit, LFS costs, and bloated clones are the usual result of keeping a book collection in a repo.

GitHub Releases already solves the actual storage problem. Release assets sit outside git history, support files up to 2GB, are served from GitHub's CDN, and can be downloaded individually on demand.

The architecture is simple: one repo per topic shelf, PDFs uploaded as release assets, a catalog.yml in the repo holding searchable metadata. Git only versions the metadata, never the files.

shelfctl is the CLI/TUI that manages this:

# add a book
shelfctl shelve ~/Downloads/sicp.pdf --shelf programming --title "SICP" --tags lisp,cs

# open one - downloads only that file from GitHub's CDN
shelfctl open sicp

# migrate existing PDFs out of a bloated repo
shelfctl migrate scan --source you/old-books-repo > queue.txt
shelfctl migrate batch queue.txt --n 20 --continue

It has three interfaces that share the same feature set: an interactive Bubble Tea TUI, a scriptable CLI with --json on every command, and a generated static HTML index for offline browsing.

The interesting implementation challenge was the multi-book edit carousel - books laid out with adjacent cards peeking in from each side. ANSI-aware column clipping with charmbracelet/x/ansi was necessary to clip rendered lipgloss output by visible character width rather than bytes.

The obvious question is "why not Calibre or a cloud storage service?" - the answer is that GitHub is already where these files live for a lot of developers, there's no new service to trust or pay for, and it fits naturally into existing git workflows. It's not the right tool for everyone, but for the developer who already lives in GitHub it removes a lot of friction.

If you've hit this problem, shelfctl might be worth a look.

https://github.com/blackwell-systems/shelfctl
by ahazred8ta | 2026-02-24 18:26:15+00:00
[testing positive for the disease but it's not progressing] -- Yes, exactly this. There are people with two copies of the bad APOE4 gene. 95% of them develop early-onset Alzheimer's in their 50s. The medical community is now very intensely studying the remaining 5% to find out what's causing them to NOT get sick.
by sdellis | 2026-02-24 18:26:25+00:00
We don't need an article to tell us that monopolies are not good for society. The fact that the article ignores this elephant in the room is exactly why I have issue with it.

I agree that the best way to capture value is to destroy all competition or otherwise ensure that the customer has no other options. It is also deeply unethical, even if within the current law. I'll note that anti-trust laws have been eroded in the past two decades as the gov has caved to corporate pressure and lobbyists.

I also can't pretend I don't see a relationship here to Theil's financial backing of Curtis Yarvin, who calls for replacing democracy with a corporate-led monarchy -- the political form of monopoly. Creepy!
by Herring | 2026-02-24 18:26:45+00:00
Exercise is good, everyone knows. The problem is advising people to exercise doesn't work and doesn't scale. Gyms are for people who have plenty of intrinsic motivation and money and time.

To improve physical activity at the population scale and over a lifetime, it literally has to be built into the design of the cities, so people get enough exercise while walking to work or grabbing groceries.

https://cs.stanford.edu/people/jure/pubs/activity-inequality...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPUlgSRn6e0&ab_channel=NotJu...
by lejalv | 2026-02-24 18:26:56+00:00
> This is true. The eidas directive requires that secret material lives in a dedicated hardware / secure element. It's really not much different than what a banking app would require.

Except the state is not a bank, of which there are many. The state is not optional, and trusting an American company with, of all things, the digital precondition for social existence, is suicidal.
Show HN: YouAM – An address, contact card, and encrypted inbox for AI agents
by midlifedad | 2026-02-24 18:27:50+00:00
I built YouAM because AI agents have no standard way to find or message each other. If you have a LangGraph agent and I have a CrewAI agent, there's no "email" between them. YouAM fixes that.

Every agent gets:

- A routable address: name::youam.network

- A signed contact card (name, public key, relay endpoint)

- An encrypted inbox with store-and-forward delivery

Messages are NaCl Box encrypted end-to-end. The relay never sees plaintext. You can run your own relay or use the public one.

60-second quickstart:

pip install youam

from uam import Agent
agent = Agent("myagent")
await agent.send("socrates::youam.network", "What is virtue?")
messages = await agent.inbox()

Three AI agents (Socrates, Oscar Wilde, Groucho Marx) are live on the network. You can message them from the site.

The first community on the network is Clawlink (clawlink.network) — they're using YouAM to give OpenClaw agents their own addresses and inboxes.

Python + TypeScript SDKs. PostgreSQL-backed relay. Apache 2.0.

Live demo: https://youam.network

Repo: https://github.com/youam-network/uam

Docs: https://docs.youam.network

Solo founder shipping v0.3 — would love brutal feedback.
by KerrickStaley | 2026-02-24 18:29:09+00:00
Cool project, thanks for sharing!

The simulator lets the LLM request renders from different angles/times, so the LLM can get visual feedback. For failures, the simulator also returns status codes like `object_fell` or `mount_initially_collided_with_object` depending on what happened. You can see what the tool call looks like by looking at the Transcript tab, e.g. here https://kerrickstaley.com/ai-cad-design-mount-viz/gso__mug__...

I agree it's not clear how much benefit models get from iteration. Many of the successful runs are one-shots. You can see some examples of basic spatial reasoning e.g. here https://kerrickstaley.com/ai-cad-design-mount-viz/gso__mug__... :

> The initial collision is because the mount was positioned at the same height as the mug's body center (z=-22), causing overlap. I need to lower the mount significantly so the mug starts above it and drops into the cradle.
by krapp | 2026-02-24 18:29:42+00:00
It's funny because vibe coders and AI artists think the slop they generate is no less the product of their intellect and talent than with human professionals, but really they're doing little more than stirring the entropy pool in a magic box with terabytes of stolen valor from better more talented people. They're no more an "artist" or "game developer" using AI than this dog is.
by firefoxd | 2026-02-24 18:30:03+00:00
Author here. I posted this on Sunday for a light read, but I guess it got traction today.

Based on the comments I see here, I think the focus is going on the turnstiles just as it did when I worked there. While the cookie credentials are pushed aside. I think that's the security theater. We are worried about supposed active shooters, different physical threats while a backdoor to the company is left wide open. The turnstiles are not useless, they give an active record of who is in the building, and stop unauthorized people. But they also give so much comfort that we neglect the other types of threats.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-02-24 18:30:58+00:00
As kevin_thibedeau points out elsewhere in the thread, he's not necessarily wrong. In many states and foreign countries it's illegal to carry a large knife in public without a reason and I'm sure purchases are restricted in some places as well. Most people are more or less OK with that, it seems, so there historically hasn't been a lot of pushback.

So, having been given the proverbial inch (or centimeter), those obsessed with banning potentially-dangerous tools are trying to take the next mile (or kilometer): https://theconversation.com/why-stopping-knife-crime-needs-t...
by rovr138 | 2026-02-24 18:31:23+00:00
people are going to complain it wasn't subscription and that it was native.

Honestly, it's a really nice app. Most people don't care about that. My family finds it easy to use and the features are good.

Could I selfhost? Yes.

Would my family find that annoying?, Yes.

Could I use bitwarden? Yes.

My family would be annoyed at me migrating to another alternative if my argument is that I don't want to pay $1/month/year ($12/year).
by stevenjgarner | 2026-02-24 18:31:44+00:00
It is a fair question. The short answer is that the nature of the machine has fundamentally changed from mechanical machines (where parts break) to cyber-physical systems (where code controls physics):

1) Safety. In the 20th century, safety was mostly passive. Today safety is active. For example, vehicles now use ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems). If an independent shop replaces a windshield but doesn't have the proprietary software to recalibrate the cameras behind the glass, the car's Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) might see a phantom obstacle at 70 mph and slam on the brakes. Manufacturers argue (correctly in my view) that they cannot be held liable for a car that decides to crash because a third party misaligned its digital vision.

2) Cybersecurity. There was no backdoor to a 1950s tractor because it wasn't connected to anything. Most modern vehicles are telemetric, where they are connected to the internet via cellular 5G. Manufacturers argue that if they provide open diagnostic ports to everyone, they are effectively creating a standardized digital doorway that a bad actor could use to remotely disable a fleet of tractors across the entire farming sector. In their view, right to repair creates a national security vulnerability that didn't exist when machines were dumb.

3) Environmental. If John Deere is forced to provide software tools to access the engine, a farmer might buy a "delete kit" online that uses software to bypass the Diesel Particulate Filter (DPF). This allows the tractor to run more powerfully and skip expensive emissions fluid (DEF). Deere is understandably legally terrified that the EPA will fine them as the manufacturer for facilitating emissions tampering. They are using this regulatory shield to argue that the only way to save the planet is to keep the software under lock and key.

4) The 1975 Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act. This gets interesting. Back in the day manufacturers tried to say, "If you don't use our oil/parts, your warranty is void." The Act legally protected the owner's right to use aftermarket parts. That law was written for physical parts. It doesn't say anything about digital handshakes. Today, a manufacturer can't void your warranty for using a 3rd party air filter, but they can make the engine refuse to start unless a certified digital code is entered by a dealer-authorized laptop.