MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by izacus | 2026-02-24 08:36:13+00:00
> Manufacturers have a strong argument against right-to-repair from the perspective of system integrity and safety - one can imagine unintended consequences and liability cascades from imperfect repair. Protection of intellectual property isn't just about software piracy and trade secrets, as opening up firmware access creates a cybersecurity nightmare of backdoors, raising environmental and regulatory compliance issues. The authorized dealer model isn't just about a monopoly - it’s about a guaranteed standard of care.

Why was that never a problem in 100 years of existence of vehicles before? Why are we suddently worrying about these "liability cascades" at the expense of market competition?
by mr_mitm | 2026-02-24 08:36:35+00:00
Are hallucinations in code generation still a problem? I thought with linters, type checkers, and compilers especially as strict as Rust, LLM agents easily catch their own mistakes. At least that's my experience: the agent writes code, runs linters and compilers, fixes whatever it hallucinated, and I probably get a working solution. I tell it to write unit tests and integration tests and it catches even more of its own mistakes. Not saying that it will always produce code free of bugs, but hallucinations haven't been an issue for me anymore.
by em-bee | 2026-02-24 08:37:08+00:00
It sounds like this was the case for you, but it doesn't mean it is the case for other men. It isn't the case for the dads I know who didn't have an in being around their babies/toddlers. They simply did not have an interest.

i don't understand how you see a contradiction here. you are observing that men have no interest in childcare, and i am explaining why.

it's a lack of role models.

unless your friends did have fathers who had in interest in child care but your friends had no interest despite that.

the problem with nurture vs nature is that it is difficult to prove one way or the other. beyond pregnancy and breastfeeding everything else can be learned. and it's difficult to prove that it isn't
by 3rodents | 2026-02-24 08:37:52+00:00
You don’t know enough people, then. There are a lot of environmentally conscious people who would absolutely first think “because it is close we should walk” and then follow up with the logical conclusion that you can’t walk to wash your car. Many people communicate by sharing their thinking process, I can think of many people who would share their ideology as it pertains to a question like this. A pragmatic environmentalist (hopefully that is all of them) would know that their ideology isn’t consequential but could certainly mention it. After all, you may need to drive your car to the car wash to wash it, but do you need to wash it? Are the chemicals used by the car wash harmful? Are there better ways to keep a car maintained?
by marstay | 2026-02-24 08:37:57+00:00
Hey HN,

I built ConsentCheck because Consent Mode v2 enforcement keeps breaking Google Ads attribution in silent ways, GA4 shows data, Ads conversions vanish, modeling fails, and most tools are just static checkers that miss real browser timing issues.
It's a free browser-based scanner that:

Loads your site in real Chromium
Simulates first-visit + reject consent → accept consent flows
Checks actual cookies set, network requests (GA/Ads/Meta/etc.), consent signals, banner behavior, TCF mismatches
Flags pre-consent fires, defaults not denied properly, conversion tracking issues, etc.

Live stats from 350 anonymized scans (Feb 2026, no URLs stored):

62% of sites fire tracking before consent
7% lose Google Ads conversions due to consent mismatches
14% have critical failures (FAIL verdict)

I recently added $9/mo monitoring (weekly automated re-scans + email alerts on changes) because re-testing sites showed almost everything breaks again within weeks (plugin updates, CMP patches, new tags, etc.).
It's bootstrapped/solo, no login needed for the free scan: https://consentcheck.online
Monitoring trial starts from scan results page (14-day free, no card upfront).
Curious what HN thinks — does this solve a real pain for anyone running Ads with EEA traffic? What's the worst Consent Mode break you've seen lately? Feedback very welcome (good or brutal).
Thanks!
by d--b | 2026-02-24 08:38:04+00:00
This should be coined the Daniel Kahneman reasoning test, mirroring his 2011 book "thinking fast and slow", which postulates that fast thinking and slow thinking occur in different parts of the brain, and that they are fundamentally different processes, that are weighted by yet another part of the brain.

This test is interesting because it asks the LLM to break a pattern recognition that's easy to shortcut. "XXX Is 50 Meters Away. Should I Walk or Drive?" is a pattern that 99% of the time will be rightly answered by "walk". And humans are tempted to answer without thinking (as reflected in the 71.5% stat OP is mentioning). This is likely more pronounced for humans that have stronger feelings about the ecology, as emotions tend to shortcut reasoning.

For a long time, LLMs have only been able to think in that "fast" mode, missing obvious trick questions like these. They were mostly pattern recognition machines.

But the more important results here, is not that "oh look! Those LLMs fail at this basic question", no. The more important result is that the latest generation actually doesn't fail.

I think I am not the only one to have noted that there was a giant leap in reasoning capacities between Sonnet 4.5 and Opus 4.6. As a developper, working with Opus 4.6 has been incredible.
by g_b | 2026-02-24 08:38:35+00:00
> Do current LLM based agents generate code which is easy to change?

They do. I am no longer writing code, everything I commit is 100% generated using an agent.

And it produces code depending on the code already in my code-base and based on my instructions, which tell it about clean-code, good-practices.

If you don't get maintainable code from an LLM it's for this reason: Garbage in, garbage out.
by calrain | 2026-02-24 08:39:02+00:00
I'm interested in this as a way to manage a calendar for my mother that is showing early signs of Dementia.

If we can centrally manage her bookings and all she has to do is look at the calendar and clearly see what is happening today, and in the near future, there is a real use-case for that.

Especially as I don't live near her, and remotely managing a calendar in her house would be amazingly useful.
by sReinwald | 2026-02-24 08:39:38+00:00
Interestingly, when I apply the "simply repeat the prompt" technique [1], Sonnet 4.6 on the website got it right every time, both with and without extended thinking.

Not repeating the prompt got a mix of walk and drive answers.

I love how prompt engineering is basically techno-alchemy

1: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.14982
by uxhacker | 2026-02-24 08:39:55+00:00
Claude fails with

“I need to replace a spark plug. The garage is 200 meters away should I walk or drive there”

“Walk! 200 meters is just a 2-3 minute stroll — no need to start the car for that distance. Plus, you’ll likely need to carry the spark plug back carefully, and walking is perfectly easy for that. “

Basically LLM suffer from context collapse.
by godelski | 2026-02-24 08:39:56+00:00
> This situation where they're the steward of the only non-Google browser is not tenable, something needs to change.

So what, you're going to help Google shove the knife in deeper? Idk man, seems like a bad way to fight Google.

But honestly it just feels like you didn't even read my comment. I'm sorry that it's a lot, but I'm petty sure people can handle 10-30 seconds of reading. I even said it doesn't matter if Mozilla is evil. How do you turn that into me giving them the benefit of the doubt. I'm literally just arguing that there's slim pickings and to not help our bigger enemy to kill their enemies. It doesn't matter if their enemies ate evil, you're just helping the bigger evil get bigger and consolidate power. I'm saying "there's more important problems right now, not be fucking dumb and get distracted or before you know it you'll lose your head"
Ask HN: How are you controlling AI agents that take real actions?
by thesvp | 2026-02-24 08:39:59+00:00
We're building AI agents that take real actions — refunds, database writes, API calls.

Prompt instructions like "never do X" don't hold up. LLMs ignore them when context is long or users push hard.

Curious how others are handling this:
- Hard-coded checks before every action?
- Some middleware layer?
- Just hoping for the best?

We built a control layer for this — different methods for structured data, unstructured outputs, and guardrails (https://limits.dev). Genuinely want to learn how others approach it.
by globular-toast | 2026-02-24 08:41:23+00:00
As someone who runs home NAS with 5+ year old drives in it, this situation sucks. I only have 4TB drives but just to replace them, not even upgrade the storage, would cost over £1000 at £170 each.

I have a couple of cold backup drives, one of which I bought for £100 in March 2025 and the other for £85 in July, so literally half the price!

If I wanted to increase the storage which, to be fair, I don't actually need, I'd be looking at closer to 2k. Guess I'll be hoping these drives last a bit longer and don't all fail at once...

This sucks more because hosting at home is the main way out of cloud lock in. I feel like something should be done to make sure regular consumers are able to buy this stuff and not just mega corps.
by input_sh | 2026-02-24 08:41:46+00:00
IMHO no. Every chatbot has so much wasted space, it really doesn't need to be full-width. Also, what's easier?

Option 1: Being on a tab, copying the URL of the tab, switching to the chatbot tab, pasting the URL and writing some instructions about what to do with that tab.

Option 2: Clicking on the "summarise page" button (whether from the sidebar or from right-click context menu), and having the browser pre-fill the prompt with the URL + the reader view version of the content on that page.
by ctmnt | 2026-02-24 08:42:10+00:00
This suffers from all the usual flaws of env variable secrets. The big one being that any other process being run by the same user can see the secrets once “injected”. Meaning that the secrets aren’t protected from your LLM agent at all.

So really all you’re doing is protecting against accidental file ingestion. Which can more easily be done via a variety of other methods. (None of which involve trusting random code that’s so fresh out of the oven its install instructions are hypothetical.)

There are other mismatches between your claims / aims and the reality. Some highlights: You’re not actually zeroizing the secrets. You call `std::process::exit()` which bypasses destructors. Your rotation doesn’t rotate the salt. There are a variety of weaknesses against brute forcing. `import` holds the whole plain text file in memory.

Again, none of these are problems in the context of just preventing accidental .env file ingestion. But then why go to all this trouble? And why make such grand claims?

Stick to established software and patterns, don’t roll your own. Also, don’t use .env if you care about security at all.

My favorite part: I love that “wrong password returns an error” is listed as a notable test. Thanks Claude! Good looking out.
by antitoxic | 2026-02-24 08:42:28+00:00
We do not require an attestation and things like token smuggling is still a problem we need to solve. We have a system that prioritizes unlinkability. So an issuer cannot track the attribute they give you. And a verifier cannot link multiple disclosures with the same attribute. This privacy really helps things like token smuggling however. Time-gated tokens may increase the difficulty, but will probably not make it impossible. Making it illegal to verify someone else's qr codes could also help of course.
by weatherlite | 2026-02-24 08:42:28+00:00
> But my point is, in terms of "natural ability", I don't believe there is that much of a gap among top performers, but that things like work ethic and determination, and also some luck in environments, is what ends up setting them apart.

You could be right; I tend to disagree but its all speculation. My 2 cents is that the vast majority of researches/professors are motivated and driven people; you can't reach those levels if you don't know how to sit on your butt and concentrate. They all have good work ethic.
I tend to think what separates Tao from the rest of the smart researchers is not that he works 15 hours a day while the rest work only 9 but rather his very very rare genius. But yeah, speculation of talent vs work ethic.
by streetfighter64 | 2026-02-24 08:43:09+00:00
What do you mean by "why we would have"? Dictionaries aren't prescriptive, they're descriptive. If by "we" you mean English speakers, clearly you don't have a word for that. But if you mean some Slavic languages, they do. Likewise, English has "ice", while other languages simply call it "frozen water". Or take the example from the linked article, "at home", which some languages do have a separate word for. I don't think many languages have a distinct word for "at work" though, or "at the shop". That simply reflects that being at home is a more common and generally important concept, just like boiling water is more important in some sense than boiling milk.

Asking for the "reasons" behind a certain word existing is sort of like asking why the human body looks the way it does. Sure, scientists may have good theories why it was evolutionary advantageous to have five fingers and no tail, but in the end the only answer that's for certain is, "because it evolved that way". So the answer is, "we" have a word for boiling water because people found it useful to have such a word.
by mrweasel | 2026-02-24 08:44:40+00:00
On paper yes. The problem is that they clutter the UI, they trigger at weird times and they turn out to be less useful that they may appear.

Then there's also people, like me, who just want the browser to browse the web. I don't want link preview (annoying feature), Firefox isn't my PDF viewer, I don't have that many tabs that I need to group them and I don't use AI chatbots.

So having a single button to disable all of these features is pretty great. I still want a Firefox Lite, that just does browsing and allows me to add the few extension I want to whatever feature I believe is missing.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-24 08:45:01+00:00
The "wiring to muscles" is derived from the ability of adjacent cells to communicate by chemical signals.

This communication ability has evolved before the multicellular animals, in the colonies of unicellular ancestors of animals (e.g. choanoflagellates).

The intercellular communication is a prerequisite for the development of multicellularity, like a common language is a prerequisite for a group of humans to be able to work as a team.

In an unicellular organism, a part of the cell senses light and another part, like flagella or contractile filaments reacts, moving the cell. In a multicellular organism, a division of labor appears, the cells from the dorsal side of the animal sense first light and other stimuli from the environment, so some of them specialize as sensory cells. Originally, the cells from the ventral side were more effective for locomotion, by using either cilia or propulsive contraction waves, so some of them specialized for locomotion, becoming motor cells, either muscles or ciliary bands (which in many simple animals are more important than muscles).

With this division of labor, the older intercellular communication methods have been improved, resulting in synapses between the sensory cells and the motor cells.

For better reactions to external stimuli, the behavior of the sensory cells had to be coordinated, e.g. even when light is sensed only on one end of the animal, for the entire animal to move an appropriate command must be sent to all motor cells, not only to some of them, which has lead to synapses between the sensory cells themselves, not only between sensory cells and motor cells.

Eventually, there was a further division of labor, a part of the sensory cells has specialized to be middlemen, i.e. to relay the sensory information between the cells that have actually received it and the motor cells. These third kind of cells have become neurons. Initially the neurons were in the skin, together with the sensory cells from which they had derived, but later they migrated inside the body, where eventually they formed ganglia instead of a diffuse net, because this minimizes the reaction times, by shortening the connections between neurons, leading to a centralized nervous system.
by rebane2001 | 2026-02-24 08:45:49+00:00
When you download an x86 program you're making a lot of other assumptions too, such as what the target operating system and hardware are. Even 8086 MSDOS software won't directly work in this emulator because it's not emulating DOS nor an IBM compatible, it has it's own addresses for the I/O. It's still x86 though.
by Gym-Berlin | 2026-02-24 08:46:35+00:00
A new specter rises in the mountains: Tehrik‑e‑Taliban Tajikistan (TTT). Born from the Taliban’s resurgence in Afghanistan, reshaped by Pakistan’s intelligence networks, and now entrenched in Chitral, this militant faction signals a dangerous evolution in the region’s security landscape. What began as a localized insurgent experiment has transformed into a proxy weapon aimed at Tajikistan and beyond—a destabilizing force that could redraw the contours of Central Asian geopolitics.
This briefing exposes the hidden alliances, covert relocations, and looming threats that make TTT not just a militant group, but a harbinger of regional upheaval.
by gkbrk | 2026-02-24 08:46:46+00:00
Because people like chat bot sidebars.

My code editor has a built-in chat bot sidebar that I use every day. It's not a huge stretch that a chat bot sidebar that a huge amount of people use in other applications would also want it in their browse.

ChatGPT is the #6 most popular website in the world, why wouldn't a browser want tighter integration with such a popular kind of service?
by defrost | 2026-02-24 08:46:50+00:00
Weird answer, but why is that a "fail" ?

Inline six cylinder engines run with a single clogged / broken spark plug.

It'd make 200 m to a garage just fine*, but who'd drive 200 m in any case?

Back in the 1970's we'd pull a spark plug and screw in a hose to use the compression phase to inflate tyres.

* Just don't make a habit of it, or reserve that knowledge for when you really need to self rescue.
by netsharc | 2026-02-24 08:46:58+00:00
> What is true - and one wasn't allowed to say - was that the measures intended to prevent COVID weren't very effective and did more harm than good.

But yet here you are saying it. Whether it's true or not probably requires a great deal of analysis, but your self-applied "psycho" label may be accurate enough if you've managed to apply lots of cognitive biases to end up with your "truth".

I'd agree the governments overreacted in many sense, but a non BoJo/Trump-government has a duty to be overcautious rather than a flippant attitude of "So what, x% dead is acceptable". Some other rules are based on dumb science: two meters distance from each other is probably a joke, a compromise between "keep everyone at home!" (what China did when there was a breakout) and a "Keep going to the pubs!", my own theory is that if you could smell someone's cigarette smoke from 2 meters away, virus particles being exhaled from their lungs would reach you too. Later we figured out getting the virus from surfaces is very unlikely, but people were still wiping surfaces down anyway...
by PacificSpecific | 2026-02-24 08:46:58+00:00
I remember around 2012 having discussions about how the 6fps input lag on ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 PS3 version was making the game borderline unplayable and that's why the PS3 version was not used at tournaments. Can't believe how far we've blasted past that benchmark.

Completely agree, input lag is the most important thing.
by rustyhancock | 2026-02-24 08:47:11+00:00
Absolutely, what I also noticed after reading it twice (well rereading the reverse engineering section).

No patreon, no Kofi. This article is a labour of love and that shows.

On the other hand the article someone couldn't be bothered to write themselves = "hey you should support me with money!".

Nothing against AI and using it to review your writing. Just something I've noticed
by Razengan | 2026-02-24 08:47:23+00:00
> What if I do not wish to be tenant and product? What can I do to change the equation?

Host your own website (on a free server for as long as you can), print out some flyers, paste them around town or pass them around (to bypass the Ad Gods), ask for donations to pay the growing costs of bandwidth etc. as you get more users?

Ultimately it comes to down to convincing people, the ickiest task on earth :<
by jcattle | 2026-02-24 08:47:23+00:00
Yea, of course they wouldn't inject that when going to a car wash.

If the question was: "I want to go to a cafe 50m away. Should I walk or drive?" I would hope that all of my friends would answer quite a bit more pointed than the LLMs: "Walk you lazy son of a ..., why are you even asking?".

Considering that, I'd say that most LLMs are being quite nice.
Software patents are dead! Pack it up! Hit the Gym! Retirement!
by taariqlewis | 2026-02-24 08:47:28+00:00
Software patents are dead! Pack it up! Hit the Gym! Retirement!

Wall Street just doesn't know it yet, but maybe tomorrow's sell-off?.

Every AI model on Earth can now read, analyze, and design around any precious patent portfolio in seconds.

Billions in software IP value? About to go to zero!

The only reason Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google haven't shipped a "Patent Killer Skill" is that they're terrified of the lawsuit avalanche.

But someone will. And when they do, the $50B patent licensing industry collapses overnight.

We're not ready for this conversation.
Agree? Disagree? Fight me in the comments.
by redat00 | 2026-02-24 08:47:29+00:00
Hi! I found that it was the most easy language to get started with. I looked at other language such as `HCL` (the Terraform language) but I thought that it would be too complex to learn, and to get started with. I really want this project to be easy to work with.

What language did you have in mind that you'd rather use compared to YAML ?
by godelski | 2026-02-24 08:48:37+00:00
It could be a difficult battle for them to fight. We'd just have to make it too costly. Make them go hunt down all the relays. Scatter them everywhere. A $5 ESP32 isn't a good relay but they still have to hunt it down and that'll cost a lot more than $5.

So the answer is the same as any war: you make it too expensive to keep fighting. It's the same reason a bunch of barely trained people in the desert won a war against a force with far greater military power. It's the same reason a bunch of jungle people defeated the country that just won a world war. It's also the same reason a bunch of rednecks defeated the largest military in the world (at the time) and were able to create an even larger empire.

It's not hard to make them give up. It's going to be a cat and mouse game but it already is
by swiftcoder | 2026-02-24 08:49:18+00:00
I'm not sure how you can read the opening paragraphs of the manifesto and come to that conclusion:

> Today the Web and Internet is owned and controlled by large for profit corporations and a few governments1. Corporate ownership combined with government policies has left us as tenant and product. It has given us a surveillance economy and enshittification

> What if I do not wish to be tenant and product?

> What can I do to change the equation?

> Those two questions lead me to a bigger question.

> What happens when ownership and control of hardware and software shifts from the domain of corporations to a world where a significant percentage are owned by individual people and cooperatives?