MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by estearum | 2026-02-20 18:25:23+00:00
This is one of those cases where the people who are most assertive about Doing X (in this case X = having kids) are specifically the types of people you do not want Doing X.

Just unbelievable levels of self-aggrandizement and scorn for your fellow humans in this comment. It is honestly a shame that you could propagate this forward another generation.

Having kids is good. Calling people "pathetic" for not wanting to or not feeling like they would succeed at it is bad and counterproductive.
by jcgrillo | 2026-02-20 18:26:25+00:00
Thanks, I will. Whether a computer program is outside the control of the original human or not (e.g. spawned a subprocess or something) is immaterial if we properly hold that human responsible for the consequences of running the computer program. If you run a computer program and it does something bad, then you did something bad. Simple, effective. If you don't trust the program to do good things, then simply don't run it. If you do run it, be prepared to defend your decision. Also that's how it currently works so we don't really need anything new. In this context "AI safety" is about bounding liability. So I guess you might care about it if you're worried about being held liable? The rest of us needn't give a shit if we can hold you accountable for your software's consequences, AI or no.
by crystal_revenge | 2026-02-20 18:26:30+00:00
> As users we need to make more efforts to move out of the American ecosystems.

While I support the spirit, it's important to acknowledge the reality of the current situation with the US (and the rest of the world). It has little to do with SaaS services and everything to do with energy and defense.

Europe imports more than half it's energy. The United States and Russia are both net exporters (Russia significantly so), China would be close to self-sufficient if not for their limited access to oil.

And while Trump may be ridiculous, he's not entirely wrong about Europe relying on the US for defense. Current estimates are that Europe needs to spent around one trillion dollars on defense to replace American support [0], and even then faces large challenges in getting their defense up to standards fast enough. Meanwhile the Ukraine war has allowed Russia to completely rework their economy into a military one.

While the popular narrative is that Trump is the sole cause of this souring relationship the reality is that geopolitics have been shifting a lot in recent decades and Europe is simply not the global position they were 50 years ago.

Europe can rely entirely on European SaaS companies and will still face massive energy and defense dependency problems.

0. https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/europes-1-trillion-race-to-...
by mmooss | 2026-02-20 18:26:48+00:00
> This is not intended to be AI advocacy

I think it is: It fits the pattern, which seems almost universally used, of turning the aggressor A into the victim and thus the critic C into an aggressor. It also changes the topic (from A's behavior to C's), and puts C on the defensive. Denying / claiming innocence is also a very common tactic.

> You can easily get death threats if you're associating yourself with AI publicly.

What differentiates serious claims from more of the above and from Internet stuff is evidence. Is there some evidence somewhere of that?
by wafflebot | 2026-02-20 18:27:09+00:00
I agree! Taste is downstream of such things as design principles which can be described in objective terms.

Taste is not synonymous with personal preferences, otherwise we wouldn't describe some taste as "bad taste" or "poor taste." Rather, to me, one's taste refers to one's power of discernment as to what is good.

We can enjoy cup-of-noodles without conflating our enjoyment as being good taste. I like a lot of things that are fairly trash.
by DannyBee | 2026-02-20 18:27:14+00:00
They claim have a pretrial agreement to reduce it to 3x compensatory damages (which would make the total judgemnet 160 million instead of 243 million).

Appealing is expensive because they have to post a bond with 100% collateral, and you pay for it yearly.
In this case, probably around 8 million a year.

So in general its not worth appealing for 5 years unless they think they will knock off 25-30% of the judgement.

Here it's the first case of it's kind so i'm sure they will appeal, but if they lose those appeals, most companies that aren't insane would cut their losses instead of trying to fight everything.
by dec0dedab0de | 2026-02-20 18:27:21+00:00
I definitely think we should highly tax, or completely ban imports from countries that basically allow slavery of their working class. Though, if anyone were to bring that up now, it would incite all kinds of emotional attacks.

I could imagine people being on board with it if they could get a tariff funded subsidy for things made in America. If the average person got an explicit discount on their Ford because some rich person paid extra taxes on their Audi, then tariffs wouldn't seem so bad. I just think the actual goal is to make them political suicide for decades.
Show HN: Manifestinx-verify – offline verifier for evidence bundles (drift)
by oneinx | 2026-02-20 18:27:49+00:00
Manifest-InX EBS is a spec + offline verifier + proof kit for tamper-evident evidence bundles.

Non-negotiable alignment:
- Live provider calls are nondeterministic.
- Determinism begins at CAPTURE (pinned artifacts).
- Replay is deterministic offline.
- Drift/tamper is deterministically rejected.

Try it in typically ~10 minutes (no signup):
1) Run the verifier against the included golden bundle → PASS
2) Tamper an artifact without updating hashes → deterministic drift/tamper rejection

Repo: https://github.com/OneInX/Manifest-InX-EBS
Skeptic check: docs/ebs/PROOF_KIT/10_MINUTE_SKEPTIC_CHECK.md

Exit codes: 0=OK, 2=DRIFT/TAMPER, 1=INVALID/ERROR

Boundaries:
- This repo ships verifier/spec/proof kit only. The Evidence Gateway (capture/emission runtime) is intentionally not included.
- This is not a “model correctness / no hallucinations” claim—this is evidence integrity + deterministic replay/verification from pinned artifacts.

Looking for feedback:
- Does the exit-code model map cleanly to CI gate usage?
- Any spec/report format rough edges that block adoption?
by moffkalast | 2026-02-20 18:28:04+00:00
Well the point is that verification can run in parallel, so if you can verify at 500 Mhz and have twenty of these units, you can run the core at 10 GHz. Minus of course the fixed single instruction verification time penalty, which gets more and more negligible the more parallel you go. Of course there is lots of overhead in that too, like GPUs painfully show.
by fuzzfactor | 2026-02-20 18:28:43+00:00
>it's likely that Trump will order people to ignore the court in this case.

He sure is confirming his contempt for the court right now on live TV.

Trying to drum up support for his hate against anything sesible in his sight.

Edit: This just in . . . he is peeved, his face just turned so red it bled plum through the orange layer. People should review this on Youtube later if nothing else for this alone. The most meaningful thing in the rant :)

Edit2: And . . . he's announcing additional tarriffs in real time. You can't make this up.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-02-20 18:28:48+00:00
Trump has added 2 trillion to the debt with today's Supreme Court decision, while giving huge tax breaks to the wealthy.

The Republican policy for 40 years had been to create unsustainable and unworkable Federal government funding/spending instead of to work to creating a working, fiscally sane Federal government. It's hard to build a working government in a two party system when one side is malicious/duplicitous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
Show HN: LobsterHelper – Managed OpenClaw on Firecracker VMs
by alex_trekkoa | 2026-02-20 18:29:15+00:00
Hey HN,

steipete mentioned in an interview that if you can't use a terminal you shouldn't use OpenClaw (paraphrasing). I disagree - the way we interact with the internet is changing, and simply because a new technology carries risk doesn't mean that one cadre of society is uniquely well-equipped to understand and accept the risks.

So, I put my money where my mouth is and built LobsterHelper.

Each instance runs in its own Firecracker micro-VM with LUKS-encrypted storage. Not Docker containers on shared infra. The VMs have no public IP - all access goes through an authenticated proxy.

I can't make the AI safe yet, but I can make the infra safe, and that's a good place to start.

We've got a long dev-log lined up (3rd party api configuration on platform, token metering, free token use tiers, openclaw UI enhancements) and we'll have bonuses for early adopters along the way.

We're on a long journey to make these technologies safer and more accessible, and we'd hope you join us for the ride.

Alex
by shikaan | 2026-02-20 18:29:34+00:00
I have played with that idea for a while until I realized I was creating a poor man's web browser in the terminal.

At that point I started wondering if converting my man folder to HTML and using lynx[1] wasn't a better idea.

I ended up using vanilla man again.

Are there better/fancier manpage readers out there that can change my mind?

[1]: https://lynx.invisible-island.net/current/
by simonw | 2026-02-20 18:29:44+00:00
Meanwhile Pam Bondi's brother is a lawyer who's firm represents clients with cases against the justice department, and those cases keep getting dropped.

- https://www.newsweek.com/trump-doj-handling-pam-bondi-brothe...

- https://abcnews.com/US/doj-drops-charges-client-ag-pam-bondi...
Ask HN: What is the current adoption scenario for background coding agents?
by daemon_9009 | 2026-02-20 18:30:03+00:00
Hi, background coding agents are here for about half a year now. But only bold and forward teams are using it so far. what is your say? have you adopted background agents in your organization or are most of the people still working with locally running coding agents? One thing i have felt is that organizations are reluctant to give access to these vendors to clone their repos in cloud machines. But what is the overall scenario? are we shifting really to background agents, if yes are organizations and teams trusting third party vendors to clone their repos on cloud machines for the agent to work on? Thanks!
Show HN: SQL Query Optimizer
by hura17 | 2026-02-20 18:30:08+00:00
Hello all,

I wrote a tool to optimize SQL queries using LLM models. I sometimes struggle to find the root cause for the slow running queries and sending to LLM most of the time doesn't have good result. I think the reason is LLM doesnt have the context of our database, schemas, explain results .etc.

That is why I decided to write a tool that gathers all infor about our data and suggest meaningful improvements including adding indexes, materialized views, or simply rewriting the query itself. The tool supports only PostgreSQL and MySQL for now , but you can easily fork and add your own desired database.

You just need to add your LLM api key and database credentials. It is an open source tool so I highly appreciate the review and contribution if you would like.

Feel free to check it out : https://github.com/SubhanHakverdiyev/OptimizeQL
by theorchid | 2026-02-20 18:30:12+00:00
Response from Cursor technical support:

In Auto-Run in Sandbox mode, the Command Allowlist isn’t applied. Sandbox replaces per-command approvals with filesystem and network restrictions, but the UI doesn’t explain this well.

Workaround: enable Legacy Terminal Tool in Cursor Settings > Agents > Inline Editing & Terminal. With that, the allowlist works as expected, and git commands will require approval again.
by danaris | 2026-02-20 18:30:23+00:00
Your thesis is completely undercut by the rest of your post.

Some foods are healthiest to eat with no processing.

Other foods require minimal processing to be healthily edible.

Still other foods require significant processing to be healthily edible.

It's almost like....there's no simple, one-line rule you can apply to food to guarantee that you are always getting the healthiest stuff!! You actually have to apply human thought, judgement, and knowledge of the subject to it!
by card_zero | 2026-02-20 18:31:05+00:00
Saying Plato is "just asking questions" seems like a cop-out, he's responsible for what he implies, whatever character he makes say it. How about the allegory of the cave? The roots of fallibilism could be traced to that allegory - except for the part about philosophers, who are the ones who have escaped the cave and have seen the sun, implying that they gain access to the absolute truth.
Show HN: Vibe coded iOS workout app with Apple Watch support
by avsavani | 2026-02-20 18:31:05+00:00
I spent a month to put together a workout app without writing a single line of code by hand. It's on par with many apps like Fitbod or Fitness AI. Got approved on iOS App Store. Let me know if you want free access, only thing I ask is to give me genuine feedback and one feature you would like to see. I will be asking Codex/Claude to rank the top features and implement it.
by defen | 2026-02-20 18:31:08+00:00
I'm fully on-board with not using master-slave terminology. I work in the embedded space where those terms were and still are frequently used, and I support not using them any more. But I've been using git pretty much since it was released and I've never heard anyone refer to a "slave repo" or "slave branch". It's always been local repo, local branch, etc. I fully believe these sorts of digital hermeneutics (e.g. using a 26-year-old mailing list post to "prove" something, when actual usage is completely different) drive division and strife, all because some people want to use it to acquire status/prestige.
by pazimzadeh | 2026-02-20 18:31:41+00:00
if you read HN a lot, then it makes sense to have have native app for it

you might not be aware of how how much power is at your fingertips on a Mac with a tool like Hammerspoon plus some other utilities

obviously you can bind the app with it's own shortcut without calling my entire browser, but I can move it to any part of any of my monitors easy with my one handed shortcuts: https://gist.github.com/pazimzadeh/b1c70f5f205d0b63264e7c021... you get the gist
https://github.com/peterklijn/hammerspoon-shiftit

I guess you could make a web app or app clip but I think this is a cool project. would be good to have a theme engine.

Look at NetNewsWire how good a native app of this kind can be. NNW in particular has great shortcuts, like or opening links in the native browser, and read/unread functionality
by shimman | 2026-02-20 18:32:00+00:00
lol you say FDR was bullying Congress, as if the New Deal coalition wasn't the most successful political movement that this country ever had (won nearly every Presidential election (only losing to the man that defeated Nazis in Europe), had control of the House from like 1932 to 1992, nearly controlled the Senate for just as long too).

Attacking FDR, someone who stood up against business interests to defend labor, kinda exposes the game here.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-20 18:32:16+00:00
> it will be really slow (multiple seconds per token!)

This is fun for proving that it can be done, but that's 100X slower than hosted models and 1000X slower than GPT-Codex-Spark.

That's like going from real time conversation to e-mailing someone who only checks their inbox twice a day if you're lucky.
by RupertSalt | 2026-02-20 18:32:39+00:00
US Consumers pay in fungible dollars, and so if your company paid for three pizzas eaten by an AWS team, and I paid for 1 ounce of Maersk fuel oil, and our Starbucks venti latte purchases paid to rethatch Juan Valdez's hut, who can even trace the serial numbers on our $1 bills?
by arjie | 2026-02-20 18:33:10+00:00
This is incredible. With this speed I can use LLMs in a lot of pre-filtering etc. tasks. As a trivial example, I have a personal OpenClaw-like bot that I use to do a bunch of things. Some of the things just require it to do trivial tool-calling and tell me what's up. Things like skill or tool pre-filtering become a lot more feasible if they're always done.

Anyway, I imagine these are incredibly expensive, but if they ever sell them with Linux drivers and slotting into a standard PCIe it would be absolutely sick. At 3 kW that seems unlikely, but for that kind of speed I bet I could find space in my cabinet and just rip it. I just can't justify $300k, you know.
by Groxx | 2026-02-20 18:33:31+00:00
Yeah, I'd really have liked to see something like [Trio](https://trio.readthedocs.io/en/stable/) gain mid more attention in Python. Structured approaches can prevent a huge amount of those issues, and Python code is absolutely riddled with concurrency problems in my experience. Much more so in practice than other languages except maybe javascript (when including async ordering mistakes). It makes it a real nightmare to try to build anything actually reliable.
by TobeyStar | 2026-02-20 18:34:44+00:00
I’ve spent some time developing LVT. It’s an attempt to unify physics by treating spacetime as an emergent informational matrix rather than a continuous fabric.
The repository contains 12 documents, ranging from the mathematical axioms (DOC00) to the engineering specs for the Nilsson-Drive (DOC07). I’ve also included the 'Ping-Pong Protocol', a testable experiment using ion traps to verify informational translation.
Everything is open source because I believe the 'source code of the universe' should be public domain. I’m looking for rigorous peer review, especially on the derivations in Phase 1.
by cael450 | 2026-02-20 18:34:46+00:00
The American constitution is riddled with problems that many later democracies managed to fix. In general, the founding fathers envisioned a system where amendments were far more common and they didn't realize they made the bar too high. And that doesn't even touch on the electoral college, first-past-the-post voting, vague descriptions of the role of the supreme court, and no method for no confidence votes. Of course, it would be next to impossible to fix these in America because it would require a significant rewrite of the constitution.

The only way this will change is if the rest of the world leaves America behind and the quality of life here becomes so bad that radical change becomes possible.

But you are right that Trump won the popular vote in 2024, so you can't blame that on the system. But a functioning democracy would have more constraints on him. Our legislative branch has been dead in the water for 20 years at this point.
by HoldOnAMinute | 2026-02-20 18:34:52+00:00
I'm a parent in my 50's. "Peak Facebook" is years in the past for me. But it was great for a while. My spouse, friends, friends' spouses, and I were all sharing stories and pictures of our kids, travels, and experiences, such as dining experiences or hikes. There was so much joyous sharing. And it wasn't done for clicks, views, or monetization. It was just friends, sharing their experiences, encouraging each other, etc. It all just went away, starting with the husbands.
by ziml77 | 2026-02-20 18:35:00+00:00
I've always been baffled why we just hand the man pages over to a normal pager rather than something that actually understands their structure. That "look up a flag" case is exactly what bothers me constantly when viewing man pages. And the search they say they should be using doesn't even work consistently since the flag might not be the first non-whitespace thing on a line if there's aliases.
by ceejayoz | 2026-02-20 18:35:40+00:00
Cool, but:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...

Trump: 49.8%

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plurality_(voting)

> A plurality vote (in North American English) or relative majority (in British English) describes the circumstance when a party, candidate, or proposition polls more votes than any other but does not receive a majority or more than half of all votes cast.

What he does have a very clear majority on currently is disapproval of his actions: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/polls/donald-trump-appro...
by card_zero | 2026-02-20 18:35:44+00:00
> the principle of fallibilism: Truths are only true if they are verified through the give and take of experience and experiment.

I think Popper would object to the phrase "truths are only true if they are verified". We don't knowingly verify truths. The things we think are truths aren't even true, they're just not false (yet).
Show HN: An offline-first ski analysis app
by skicoachapp | 2026-02-20 18:35:52+00:00
I’m a solo developer based in Austria and over the past year I built a ski technique analysis app that runs fully offline on the phone.

No cloud processing.
No account system.
No subscription model.

I originally built it because I was frustrated with two things:
1. seasonal sports apps charging year-round subscriptions
2. performance data being tied to cloud accounts for no strong technical reason

Instead of debating the model, I decided to try building something different.

⸻

The technical approach

The app processes:
• GPS
• motion sensors
• acceleration data

All analysis happens on-device.

The biggest challenges weren’t UI. They were:
• sensor noise during aggressive turns
• battery drain during long ski days
• balancing sampling rate vs. usable signal
• designing a scoring model that feels intuitive but is still technically grounded

The offline requirement made architecture simpler in some ways and harder in others.

No backend meant:
• no server costs
• no sync logic
• no auth system
• no cloud ML pipeline

But it also meant:
• everything must run within phone constraints
• optimization matters
• no ability to “fix it in the cloud”

⸻

What didn’t work
• I overestimated how much people care about privacy as a primary selling point.
• Distribution is significantly harder than engineering.
• Launch posts don’t move the needle nearly as much as you think.

The app currently has 600+ downloads across iOS and Android. No investors. No paid marketing.

Getting the first 100 users was easier than getting from 300 to 600.

⸻

The business decision

I chose one-time pricing instead of subscription.

From a pure revenue perspective, subscription would likely generate more predictable income.

But I wanted to see whether a niche sports product could survive without recurring revenue and without cloud dependency.

It may turn out that this was financially naive. I genuinely don’t know yet.

⸻

What I’m struggling with now
• distribution without hype cycles
• explaining “offline” in a way that isn’t marketing-sounding
• deciding whether staying small and sustainable is enough

I’m curious how other builders think about:
• offline-first architectures in 2026
• one-time pricing viability
• building for niche seasonal markets

Happy to answer technical questions.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-20 18:36:24+00:00
> How can you "check" that which you don't "understand"?

??? I do understand, since I literally just instructed it, how would I otherwise? I'm not letting the LLM do the design, it's all me still. So the "understand" already exists before the LLM even finished working.

> I'm a professional and I can tell you how I use LLMs: I write code with their assistance, they don't write code for me.

Hey, welcome to the club, me too :) I don't write code, I write English prose, yet nothing is vibe coded, and probably I'll end up being able to spend more time than you thinking about the design and architecture and how it fits in, because actual typing is no longer slowing me down. Yet again, every line is reviewed multiple times.

It's more about the person behind the tools, than the tools themselves I think ultimately. Except for Copilot probably, the times I've tried it I've just not been able to produce code that is even slightly up to my standards. It's a breeze with Codex though (5.2), and kind of hit and miss with Claude Code.