MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ndsipa_pomu | 2026-02-12 19:23:06+00:00
> Do they not have ticket quotas like US cops?

I don't believe so. They've undoubtedly got various performance measures for the various police forces, but I don't think they have a simple arrest quota for individual officers. If they did have to ramp up their numbers, then I think it'd be an easy job for a cycling officer with a camera to go around and capture all the blatant phone use. Unfortunately, when Avon&Somerset police (my area) provide a positive response to video submissions, they use a standard phrase like "As a result of this report I can confirm a positive outcome in that the driver(s) identified in the submission(s) will receive either a warning letter, a fixed penalty or a prosecution." which doesn't provide much feedback as to what action they are taking (a warning letter is barely an action though I do think they're a good idea). I have also had responses where they also mention a possible NIP (notice of intended prosecution).

As a counter-example of police just looking to make easy arrests, there plenty of reports on https://road.cc where certain forces (e.g. Lancashire) seem to bend over backwards to not take any action on cyclist submitted videos. It's a bit of a lottery as to which areas take things like close passes seriously or not.
by joe_mamba | 2026-02-12 19:24:07+00:00
Firstly, how is the world's most powerful military afraid of "cartel drones"? Don't they already have some sci-fi laser/EW gizmos to take care of those considering how much taxpayer dollars go to the defense sector?

Secondly, contrary to popular belief, cartel leaders are smart enough to know not to directly mess with and attract the wrath of the US military when that's not good for their core business.
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2026-02-12 19:24:22+00:00
Why 5-10 years?

At current rates, price per equivalent output is dropping at 99.9% over 5 years.

That's basically $0.01 in 5 years.

Does it really need to be that cheap to be worth it?

Keep in mind, $0.01 in 5 years is worth less than $0.01 today.
by thinkharderdev | 2026-02-12 19:25:13+00:00
This will obviously depend on which implementation you use. Using the rust arrow-rs crate you at least get panics when you overflow max buffer sizes. But one of my enduring annoyances with arrow is that they use signed integer types for buffer offsets and the like. I understand why it has to be that way since it's intended to be cross-language and not all languages have unsigned integer types. But it does lead to lots of very weird bugs when you are working in a native language and casting back and forth from signed to unsigned types. I spent a very frustrating day tracking down this one in particular https://github.com/apache/datafusion/issues/15967
by guessmyname | 2026-02-12 19:25:21+00:00
Lying with charts → https://handsondataviz.org/how-to-lie-with-charts.html

Also → https://medium.com/@hypsypops/axes-of-evil-how-to-lie-with-g...

More → https://researchguides.library.yorku.ca/datavisualization/li...

And → https://vdl.sci.utah.edu/blog/2023/04/17/misleading/
by gordonhart | 2026-02-12 19:25:47+00:00
The main coding agent failure modes I've seen:

- Proliferation of utils/helpers when there are already ones defined in the codebase. Particularly a problem for larger codebases

- Tests with bad mocks and bail-outs due to missing things in the agent's runtime environment ("I see that X isn't available, let me just stub around that...")

- Overly defensive off-happy-path handling, returning null or the semantic "empty" response when the correct behavior is to throw an exception that will be properly handled somewhere up the call chain

- Locally optimal design choices with very little "thought" given to ownership or separation of concerns

All of these can pretty quickly turn into a maintainability problem if you aren't keeping a close eye on things. But broadly I agree that line-per-line frontier LLM code is generally better than what humans write and miles better than what a stressed-out human developer with a short deadline usually produces.
by coffeefirst | 2026-02-12 19:25:54+00:00
Because this is the first glimpse of a world where anyone can start a large, programmatic smear campaign about you complete with deepfakes, messages to everyone you know, a detailed confession impersonating you, and leaked personal data, optimized to cause maximum distress.

If we know who they are they can face consequences or at least be discredited.

This thread has as argument going about who controlled the agent which is unsolvable. In this case, it’s just not that important. But it’s really easy to see this get bad.
by christophilus | 2026-02-12 19:25:54+00:00
Has any harness matched the effectiveness of Claude Code yet? I haven't experimented much recently, but every time I have in the past, I wasn't able to get any other tool to approach how effective I am in CC.

I'd love to use a different harness-- ideally an OSS one-- and hook it up to whichever LLM provides the best bang for the buck rather than being tied to Claude.
by rajraina_exp | 2026-02-12 19:26:19+00:00
Is this a weird website? I built a site where you can bet on my real-life biometric outcomes (heart rate, step size, etc.).

I'm letting people bet on my biomarkers. I figure since late stage capitalism encourages betting literally everywhere, my not on my heart rate?

It's free-to-play, easy, and the winner gets a $100 Amazon gift card.

Sign up at: bet-on-raj.rajraina.com

And more info about the overall project at f-art.rajraina.com

Open to hearing why this is the dumbest idea ever, & looking forward to seeing who prices me best!
Show HN: Built two remote tools for coding agents (one in a night)
by Geddydukes | 2026-02-12 19:26:19+00:00
I wanted to control CLI coding agents from my phone while away from my desk.

Built Visor first: a messaging bridge that lets you start agent tasks, get
notified via SMS/Telegram when they need input, and respond from your phone.

Got it working with multi-provider messaging (Twilio, Telegram, Email, iMessage),
multi-session management, and multi-repo support. But the UI felt clunky for
quick terminal access.

Tried Terminus ($10/mo service). Loved it, but wanted:
- Self-hosted over Tailscale (no public exposure)
- Single-user (just me)
- Free and customizable going forward whenever I need to add functionality.

Built T-Lite in one night:
- SSH from iPhone browser
- WebSocket bridge to PTY sessions
- Reconnect with output replay
- Mobile keyboard shortcuts
- Tailscale-only

Both open source:
- Visor: https://github.com/Geddydukes/visor
- T-Lite: https://github.com/Geddydukes/t-lite

Use T-Lite for quick terminal access, Visor for long-running agent tasks
that need async interaction.
by dtagames | 2026-02-12 19:26:19+00:00
I don't think you'd get a reply. The TOS is clear and questions about it are legal questions. If you're so inclined, you could hire a lawyer to talk to their lawyer -- or even to answer your question about if it's a TOS violation.

But there's an easier way to tell. Every feature that is in every game in the Nintendo store is a feature that doesn't violate TOS. And no features that aren't already in the games in the store would be allowed by the TOS. So if you haven't seen it in-game already, it's not going to be allowed. Full stop.

This is true of Xbox, and PlayStation, too, and all other cloud-based services and stores like the App Store, etc. On PC, the difference is obvious, with game devs using an SDK (like mod.io) to include and promote mods in their games. They're making it official. Until you see some UGC inside an official game on the Nintendo store, I think it's safe to say it doesn't exist.
by llsf | 2026-02-12 19:26:21+00:00
And to some extent, I also drive with my ears, not only with 2 eyes. I often can ear a car driving on the blind spot. Not saying that I do need to ear in order to drive, but the extra sensor is welcome when it can helps.

There is an argument for sure, about how many sensors is enough / too much. And maybe 8 cameras around the car is enough to surpass human driving ability.

I guess it depends on how far/secure we want the self-driving to be. If only we had a comprehensive driving test that all (humans and robots) could take and be ranked... each country lawmakers could set the bar based on the test.
by renato_shira | 2026-02-12 19:27:18+00:00
yeah this clicked for me when i stopped obsessing over which model to use and focused on how i structure the context and feedback loops around it. for my project the same model went from "barely usable" to "legitimately helpful" just by changing how i fed it context and how i validated its output.

the user inclusion part is real too. the best results i get aren't from fully autonomous agents, they're from tight human-in-the-loop cycles where i'm steering in real time. the model does the heavy lifting, i do the architectural decisions and error correction. feels more like pair programming than automation.
by arcanemachiner | 2026-02-12 19:27:35+00:00
Or, they have freed up time for more useful endeavours, that may otherwise have spent on drudgery.

I don't discount the value of blood, sweat and tears spent on debugging those hard issues, and the lessons learned from doing so, but there is a certain point where it's OK to take a pass and just let the robots figure it out.
by wussboy | 2026-02-12 19:27:44+00:00
I find my trust in anything I see on the Internet quickly eroding. I suspect/hope that in the near future, no one will be able to be blacklisted or cancelled, because trust in the Internet has gone to zero.

I've been trying to hire a web dev for the last few months, and repeatedly encounter candidates just reading responses from Chat GPT. I am beginning to trust online interviews 0% and am starting, more and more, to crawl my personal connections for candidates. I suspect I'm not the only one.
by bonesss | 2026-02-12 19:27:47+00:00
LoC desire-ability is also dependent on projects stage.

Early we should see huge chunky contributions and bursts. Loc means things are being realized.

In a mature product shipping at a sustained and increasing velocity, seeing LoC decrease our grow glacially year-on-year is a warm fuzzy feeling.

By my estimation aircraft designs should grow a lot for a bit (from 0 to not 0), churn for a while, then aim for specified performance windows in periods of punctuated stability.

Reuse scenarios create some nice bubbles where LoC growth in highly validated frameworks/components is amazing, as surrounding systems obviate big chunks of themselves. Local explosions, global densification and refinement.
Show HN: What is HN thinking? Real-time sentiment and concept analysis
by ddtaylor | 2026-02-12 19:27:53+00:00
Hi HN,

I made Ethos, an open-source tool to visualize the discourse on Hacker News. It
extracts entities, tracks sentiment, and groups discussions by concept.

Check it out: https://ethos.devrupt.io

This was a "budget build" experiment. I managed to ship it for under $1 in infra
costs. Originally I was using `qwen3-8b` for the LLM and `qwen3-embedding-8b`
for the embedding, but I ran into some capacity issues with that model and
decided to use `llama-3.1-8b-instruct` to stay within a similar budget while
having higher throughput.

What LLM or embedding would you have used within the same price range? It would
need to be a model that supports structured output.

How bad do you think it is that `llama-3.1` is being used and then a higher
dimension embedding? I originally wanted to keep the LLM and embedding within
the same family, but I'm not sure if there is munch point in that.

Repo: https://github.com/devrupt-io/ethos

I'm looking for feedback on which metrics (sentiment vs. concepts) you find most
interesting! PRs welcome!
by milesskorpen | 2026-02-12 19:27:57+00:00
Yes: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/airspace-closure-followed-spat-...

FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford on Tuesday night decided to close the airspace — without alerting White House, Pentagon or Homeland Security officials, sources said.

...

Customs and Border Protection used the laser weapon earlier this week after training from the U.S. military, according to multiple sources familiar with its deployment. Officials had recently given the FAA a 10-day window in which the technology would be used.

The anti-drone technology was launched near the southern border to shoot down what appeared to be foreign drones. The flying material turned out to be a party balloon, sources said. One balloon was shot down, several sources said.

The Mexican cartels have been running drones on the border lately, the sources said, but it was unclear how many were hit by the military's anti-UAS (unmanned aircraft systems) technology this week. One official said at least one cartel drone was successfully disabled.
by simonw | 2026-02-12 19:29:07+00:00
No, not for days - but it churned away on that one for about ten minutes.

I don't think I've got any examples of multi-hour or multi-day sessions that ran completely uninterrupted - this one back in December took 4.5 hours but I had to prompt it to keep going a few times along the way: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/15/porting-justhtml/
by hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm | 2026-02-12 19:29:44+00:00
Children have great levels of fluid intelligence, that's how they are able to learn to quickly navigate in a world that they are still very new to. Seniors with decreasing capacity increasingly rely on crystallised intelligence, that's why they can still perform tasks like driving a car but can fail at completely novel tasks, sometimes even using a smartphone if they have not used one before.
by Jordan-117 | 2026-02-12 19:30:01+00:00
More alarmingly, the laser weapon was deployed before the FAA actually shut down the airspace:

https://apnews.com/article/faa-el-paso-texas-air-space-close...

I'd say these trigger-happy clowns chasing tough-guy optics are going to get innocent people killed, but then they already have -- multiple times.
by esseph | 2026-02-12 19:30:01+00:00
I am not sure how much the average person realizes that drones in both a reconnaissance and observation role or an attack role have changed the nature of warfare and have threatened localities.

We don't have good tools to deal with them, especially groups.

It would be trivial, right now, for a few fpv drones to cause extreme chaos somewhere like a popular highway in Los Angeles, and the amount of economic damage that could do.

It's a technological shift in how warfare is conducted, but from a protection standpoint, the tools aren't great to counter them yet.
by andai | 2026-02-12 19:30:11+00:00
Maybe so, but I did once spend 12 hours straight debugging an Emscripten C++ compiler bug! (After spending the first day of the jam setting up Emscripten, and the second day getting Raylib to compile in it. Had like an hour left to make the actual game, hahah.)

I am a bit thick with such things, but just wanted to provide the context that Emscripten can be a fickle beast :)

I sure am glad I can now deploy Infinite Mechanized Autistic Persistence to such soul-crushing tasks, and go make a sandwich or something.

(The bug turned out to be that if I included a boolean in a class member, the whole game crashed, but only the Emscripten version. Sad. Ended up switching back to JS, which you basically need anyway for most serious web game dev.)
by CobrastanJorji | 2026-02-12 19:30:28+00:00
While I find the animistic idea that all things have a spirit and should be treated with respect endearing, I do not think it is fair to equate derogative language targeting people with derogative language targeting things, or to suggest that people who disparage AI in a particular way do so specifically because they hate black people. I can see how you got there, and I'm sure it's true for somebody, but I don't think it follows.

More likely, I imagine that we all grew up on sci fi movies where the Han Solo sort of rogue rebels/clones types have a made up slur that they use for the big bad empire aliens/robots/monsters that they use in-universe, and using it here, also against robots, makes us feel like we're in the fun worldbuilding flavor bits of what is otherwise a rather depressing dystopian novel.
by doctorpangloss | 2026-02-12 19:30:40+00:00
we live in a crazy time where 9 of every 10 new repos being posted to github have some sort of newly authored solutions without importing dependencies to nearly everything. i don't think those are good solutions, but nonetheless, it's happening.

this is a very interesting conversation actually, i think LLMs satisfy the actual demand that OSS satisfies, which is software that costs nothing, and if you think about that deeply there's all sorts of interesting ways that you could spend less time maintaining libraries for other people to not pay you for them.
by chaps | 2026-02-12 19:30:42+00:00
Sure -- it's something I figured out during the 2020 protests for some reporting work I was doing which led to this reporting: https://thetriibe.com/2020/12/hundreds-of-chicago-police-mad...

This reporting was made possible because it's surprisingly easy to export recording start/stop time, file size, duration, notes, cop badge and model name from the underlying system with a couple clicks (this is true for any agency that uses axon: https://my.axon.com/s/article/Justice-Exporting-search-resul...). I threw that info into postgres, made a materialized view with a column that gets the filesize:duration ratio and filtered for videos with a certain ratio. I never did anything with it besides that article I posted before.

Here's an observable about the BWC analysis that went into the reporting (disclaimer: the observable is mid-iteration that never received a followup. the analysis itself is separate from the reporting): https://observablehq.com/d/9f09764dbbdfc4b5
by alt227 | 2026-02-12 19:30:47+00:00
Lol 'breaches'.

I agree with other posters that you seem to be capable of network level forensics, but you have said nothing to back up what you consider a device breach other than 'some cloud destined network traffic which disapears after a hard reset'.

In my experience of forensic reports, this link is tenuous at best and would not be considered evidence or even suspected breach based on that alone.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-02-12 19:31:03+00:00
Well, it could be a batch editor, such as linux's sed, invoked from the command line, or with "computer use" the model could indeed potentially drive a real interactive editor.

Part of the problem though is that tools like Claude Code don't want to assume too much of the environment - that a specific editor is available, or even that it is running on a particular OS. The way it remains platform agnostic and not reliant on specific tools is by only having a dependency on Node.js, which provides file read/write support, so to implement an edit request the agent uses Node.js to read the file, itself implements the edit, then again uses Node.js to create the new updated file.
by nocman | 2026-02-12 19:31:16+00:00
> - Every day that passes, the gulf between Lisp's tooling and what a typical user expects grows wider. It needs to escape Emacs and SLIME to something that feels complete and polished.

Can you give specific examples of "what a typical user expects" that are missing from Emacs-based programming environments (SLIME, and/or others)? I'm not suggesting there aren't any, I'd just like to know your list.
by the_harpia_io | 2026-02-12 19:31:21+00:00
honestly the harness thing is way more important than people realize - I've been working on code security tools and the gap between what a model generates raw vs with better structure is massive, way bigger than model versions mattering. like the security bugs I see in AI code, half of them are just because the prompt didn't include enough context or the edit format was wonky

the benchmark overselling isn't the point though - it's that we're barely using these things right. most people still chat with them like it's 2023. what happens when you combine this with actual review flows not just 'beat swe-bench'

idk I think everyone's too focused on the model when tooling matters more, since that's something you can actually control
by alexpadula | 2026-02-12 19:31:29+00:00
TidesDB is a storage engine, you use it to build databases. It's persistent and built on a log-structured-merge tree (LSM) with modern research incorporated such as

* Spooky - Granulating LSM-Tree Compactions Correctly

* WiscKey - Key-value seperation

TidesDB has cache layers such as a clock block cache but it's mainly a persistent layer and a library.

I also have a presentation on TidesDB you can find here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HROlAaiGVQ

Memcached is a cache, TidesDB is an engine for building databases, think a game engine for building games like say Unity.
Show HN: PolyMCP – Run MCP Python Tools in WASM via Pyodide
by justvugg | 2026-02-12 19:32:15+00:00
PolyMCP now supports compiling Python MCP tools to WebAssembly using Pyodide.

This means any Python function exposed as an MCP tool can now run directly in the browser, Node.js, or edge workers, fully sandboxed, without a Python server.

Compile your tools, serve the bundle, and AI agents can call them instantly in WASM environments. Existing MCP features like input validation, error handling, and tool orchestration work seamlessly.

example:

from polymcp.polymcp_toolkit import expose_tools_wasm

def add(a: int, b: int) -> int:
"""Add two numbers"""
return a + b

compiler = expose_tools_wasm([add])
bundle = compiler.compile(output_dir="./dist")

Open dist/demo.html in your browser — the add tool runs entirely in WASM.

Why it matters
• No Python server required: runs client-side or on edge
• Secure: sandboxed execution
• Plug-and-play: multiple tools in one WASM bundle
• Ideal for interactive demos, edge AI apps, or browser-based automation

Repo: https://github.com/poly-mcp/Polymcp
by kmansm27 | 2026-02-12 19:32:21+00:00
We use the Claude Agent SDK and the Codex App server, which makes it easier to maintain (we used to parse out the literal terminal when we first launched, which was not maintainable - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44878650). There's also ACP (https://agentclientprotocol.com/get-started/introduction) which we'll probably integrate eventually, which should make it easier to manage all the harnesses.
by caminante | 2026-02-12 19:32:24+00:00
> settling a lawsuit in this way is also a worthless indicator of wrongdoing

Only if you use a very narrow criteria that a verdict was reached. However, that's impractical as 95% of civil cases resolve without a trial verdict.

Compare this to someone who got the case dismissed 6 years ago and didn't pay out tens of millions of real dollars to settle. It's not a verdict, but it's dishonest to say the plaintiff's case had zero merit of wrongdoing based on the settlement and survival of the plaintiff's case.
by eafer | 2026-02-12 19:32:28+00:00
I think "made up" is fair. I can't know what his process was and everybody makes mistakes, but almost every single thing he said about history was wrong in a way that was convenient to his narrative, and it's not like he ever retracted anything. Surely if he wrote a whole book about dealing with bullshit he could have used that opportunity for some reflection about his past mistakes, now that would have been interesting to read.
by maxbond | 2026-02-12 19:32:56+00:00
What's the advantage in putting agents in the persistence layer rather than the application layer? This seems to me strictly less flexible, scalable, secure, easy to work with... I am having a hard time imagining why I would want to integrate with APIs or writing an agentic harness in the database rather than in application code?

Maybe I'm behind the times but I don't understand.
by runjake | 2026-02-12 19:32:59+00:00
Right, I think the use of "0-day" as "stolen, unreleased software by software pirates" predates the current use.

The other commenter is right, there's a lot of overlap in the communities. It's strange to me that I was in the "field" a good 20 years before I ever thought it would be a career opportunity. This is not a complaint by any means. :-)