MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: iherb-CLI – An agent-optimized CLI for AI-driven supplement research
by sebubu | 2026-02-15 19:08:23+00:00
iHerb has no public API, so I built a CLI that gives AI agents structured access to their entire product catalog. The idea: let your AI assistant autonomously research supplements, compare ingredients and dosages, and recommend products for a health protocol — backed by real data, not just training knowledge.

The CLI outputs clean Markdown, caches results, and handles Cloudflare bot protection via a headless browser. It ships as a Claude Code skill, so you can ask things like "compare the top 3 magnesium glycinate supplements by price and bioavailability" and the agent will do multi-step research on its own.

Built in Rust. No API key or account needed.
by awongh | 2026-02-15 19:09:24+00:00
Compared to the USA, is a contributing factor because things can't be put on discount sale in the EU?

In american many things are always on a discount, and there are so many channels through which this discounted merchandise is funneled. Which has to be a major way retails manage excess stock.

A lot of people don't realize that european retailers are legally disallowed from selling at a discount.

Edit to clarify: things can't be put on sale, except for a few times during the year? I guess this is not every country, although I'm not sure which and when.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2026-02-15 19:09:33+00:00
That doesn't appear to be accurate, at least from the Wikipedia article.

Robert Bork (sorry to add my personal commentary but an absolute shit stain of a human being) was nominated for the Supreme Court (which, thankfully, he always not confirmed), and a reporter went to a video rental store and asked for his rental history, which there was no law against. The published article didn't include much, as Bork hadn't rented any particularly salacious material, but there was bipartisan outrage that this had occurred.

Just goes to show how far we've fallen when there was once bipartisan outrage over accessing your Blockbuster rental history, when tech giants now have 10 times as much surveillance on you - your 1 am "shower thoughts" in your search history, all the websites you've visited, all your social media posts, and even social media posts about/including you posted by someone else, everything you've ever commented on a blog forum, your location history, etc.
by iamnothere | 2026-02-15 19:09:39+00:00
I never said it was necessary, only that it was universal.

I suspect that the recent aversion to slavery is more of a function of our relative level of development (and the education that comes with it) than anything else. Morality can only thrive when there is a reasonable standard of living, otherwise people will find ways to justify evil.

Today it seems that we are at a level of development where we can only justify slavery if it is out of sight. I hope we can advance further, but we may be at our limit, as other moral taboos are already breaking down.
by b00ty4breakfast | 2026-02-15 19:09:56+00:00
If I donate something on the premise that it's going to be used for some charitable cause and then it just ends up on some skuzzy listing on ebay, that would, at best, be deceitful. It's "good" insofar as the item is not being dumped in some landfill but it's not "good" insofar as it was obtained through deception.
by plutodev | 2026-02-15 19:10:16+00:00
This is a really sharp breakdown.

What’s interesting here is that this isn’t just “fast mode vs fast mode” it’s serving optimization vs hardware optimization.

Anthropic optimized batching and infra economics while keeping the same core model.
OpenAI optimized hardware + model pairing with Cerebras, but had to ship a distilled version (Spark) to make it work.

Two very different layers of the stack.

Personally, I still think reliability compounds more than raw tokens/sec especially for agent workflows where mistake cost dominates latency cost. Speed is great, but error rate determines real productivity.

This is also why infrastructure diversity matters. Beyond just centralized labs, platforms like io.net are interesting because they focus on accessible, distributed GPU infrastructure and open model ecosystems which gives builders flexibility to experiment with performance vs capability tradeoffs themselves.

The real win here isn’t just “faster models.”
It’s giving developers more control over how inference is served.
Show HN: OpenContext – Bring Your Own Coding Agent, Local-First, No Vendor Lock
by akarnam37 | 2026-02-15 19:10:39+00:00
OpenContext is a personal context store for AI agents that reuses your existing CLI tools (Codex, Claude, OpenCode) while adding a sleek GUI and built-in skills—no need for additional agent subscriptions or complex setups. Perfect for local AI workflows, hybrid retrieval, and boosting productivity with persistent memory. Dive in and supercharge your dev setup: https://github.com/adityak74/opencontext
by vunderba | 2026-02-15 19:10:53+00:00
Nice job. I think the OG of Win98 JS recreation from about a decade ago (which even has a working version of Space Cadet in it) is still around as well!

https://github.com/1j01/98

https://98.js.org

One interesting thing about it is that when you navigate to a site in the 98JS copy of IE - it actually serves you an older wayback mirror copy of the original site (try yahoo.com for example).
by hn_acker | 2026-02-15 19:11:07+00:00
> And do you know WHY you wouldn't get sued under section 230 when publishing content on a major corporate website?

> Because lawsuits aren't free.

Before Section 230, suing someone who posted defamation about you (which you can still do, because Section 230 has never restricted you from doing so) was not free either.
by lp4v4n | 2026-02-15 19:11:30+00:00
Fashion is a deeply irrational market that preys on the worst of human nature. There are companies selling cotton t-shirts with a logo on them for 500 dollars. You might say ok, if people are dumb enough to buy that then that's not my problem. So now there are companies creating the environmental cost of destroying viable products just to sustain this kind of grifting.

On top of that I think that society, as a general principle, should demand more product transparency in the form of regulation. What are the actual environmental costs of a certain product? Where are the components coming from? What kind of production process did that industry adopt? All this should be clear in the description of a product.

The way things are right now the incentives are geared towards trying to industrialize and sell the worst kind of product for the highest price and offload to society as an externality the environmental and social costs of doing so.
by avaer | 2026-02-15 19:11:39+00:00
Agreed, I was thinking it's like asm.js where it can "backdoor pilot" [1] an interesting use case into the browser by making it already supported by default.

But not being able to "just" load the file into a browser locally seems to defeat a lot of the point.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_pilot#Backdoor_pilo...
by noupdates | 2026-02-15 19:11:42+00:00
Take the following crude entities:

- Stones

- Sticks

- Some rope

Takes awhile, but humans eventually make a murder weapon out of that and build armies.

Now take the benign elements of a crud stack:

- Database

- Server

- User system

It takes awhile, but eventually humans will make something (something not good) out of that.

Sticks and stones may hurt my bones, but databases will never hurt me

Right?
by jfrbfbreudh | 2026-02-15 19:12:31+00:00
The author could be technically competent, but I think he’s completely failed to recognize one of the core principles of getting recognition and promotions at work:

Who are you bringing with you?

As in, who else gets recognition and success as a result of you doing well? If it’s your boss, great, promotion likely. If it’s your skip, even better.

If the result of your grand project is that it solely makes you look good, nobody else is incentivized to support you in any capacity. It’s much more likely that it will have the exact opposite effect: you will be seen as a selfish and ambitious threat.
by Galanwe | 2026-02-15 19:13:36+00:00
I used to work for a well known communication app, the kind everyone here used. Couple things I learnt about "end to end encryption":

- You can call your service e2e encrypted even if every client has the same key bundled into the binary, and rotate it from time to time when it's reversed.

- You can call your service e2e encrypted even if you have a server that stores and pushes client keys. That is how you could access your message history on multiple devices.

- You can call your service e2e encrypted and just retrieve or push client keys at will whenever you get a government request.
by arendtio | 2026-02-15 19:14:14+00:00
Well, traditionally, there was no Python/pip, JS/npm in Linux development, and for C/C++ development, the package manager approach worked surprisingly well for a long time.

However, there were version problems: some Linux distributions had only stable packages and therefore lacked the latest updates, and some had problems with multiple versions of the same library. This gave rise to the language-specific package managers. It solved one problem but created a ton of new ones.

Sometimes I wish we could just go back to system package managers, because at times, language-specific package managers do not even solve the version problem, which is their raison d'être.
by mgraczyk | 2026-02-15 19:14:17+00:00
Nope, this is cope

Tons of diagnostic interventions have been scaled without strong outcome data. For example many clinics now do fractional exhaled nitric oxide (FeNO) tests because they are safe, fairly cheap, and patients often pay directly out of pocket so they are easy to make money on.

But the evidence for the diagnostic usefulness of this test is extremely low, multiple meta analysis have concluded.

The reason FeNO tests are done but not MRIs is because FeNO tests are $40
by recursivecaveat | 2026-02-15 19:14:26+00:00
4o was ridiculously agreeable. It would go along with anything: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43840842 The last time they moved to deprecate it there was a similar backlash which resulted in them reversing that. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44842147 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44839842
by andrewflnr | 2026-02-15 19:14:29+00:00
Oh, so you pattern-matched on a single word and skipped the part where I did, in fact, make an argument. Great work.

But more importantly, where did MarkusQ ridicule you? What's your excuse for not reading what they actually said, but instead imagining something they said that was conveniently easy to criticize?

The important part of my phrase "laughably bad-faith" was the bad-faith part. That's what destroys "that relationship".
by tremon | 2026-02-15 19:14:42+00:00
https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-43/

> Consent is presumed not to be freely given [..] if the performance of a contract, including the provision of a service, is dependent on the consent despite such consent not being necessary for such performance.

https://noyb.eu/en/pay-or-okay-explained-why-more-and-more-w...

> the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) is working on a binding opinion on 'Pay or Consent', which will determine whether Europeans continue to have a realistic option to protect their privacy online. If the approach is legitimised for Meta, companies across all industries could follow suit - which would mark the end of genuine consent to the use of European's data.
by barnabee | 2026-02-15 19:14:48+00:00
I buy the support argument for companies.

I also buy the argument that a lot of time people are actually paying for cloud storage. While I'd love to see a generic protocol for cloud or self-hosted storage that every app can sync to, I expect we'll continue to see subscription software persist by locking down and gatekeeping cloud storage and sync, too.

But really I would be happy for that to go away.

I don't use much software that's sold in any way[0], and I'd prefer it to be none. The ideal situation is for it to always be better to collaborate on open source software than to build in private and keep it to yourself.

[0] I do donate to projects I like and use, though
by coliveira | 2026-02-15 19:15:13+00:00
They figured out that if the government does something it is opposed by a lot of people. But if a company says they'll collect information from every single customer in exchange for some worthless token, people will willingly provide all their information to said company. And those companies will either sell that info to governments or give it away with a little ask... So, the private economy has become the biggest contributor to the surveillance state.
by lp4v4n | 2026-02-15 19:15:21+00:00
>Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore.

It's like this in a lot of places now. We're seeing climate change in the interval of a generation. It's absolutely scary.

> The acid rain from the 90s destroyed most of green on adjacent cities and when it is hot it gets in unbearably hot and when it is cold it gets stupidly cold.

What country do you live in if you don't mind telling us?
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-02-15 19:15:26+00:00
>and sends them for recycling.

>If the recycler sells them on ebay as 'never worn ExampleCo jeans' then

the recycler will have undoubtedly violated a contract they have with ExampleCo and will lose in civil court and pay significant penalties greater than the money they made selling never worn ExampleCo jeans and also, undoubtedly, suffer from not having ExampleCo as a customer for their services in the future.
by olyjohn | 2026-02-15 19:15:57+00:00
I had hoped that by now, people would be educated and tech savvy enough on computers that something like this could be a reality. But these fucking phones and tablets have made people so computer illiterate, there is no hope for something like this working.

Computers run every part of our lives, and it's fucking preposterous that learning the basics of how to operate a computer aren't part of elementary school education. Now it's just "tap app" and look how it's trapped everybody into a world of ignorance.
by rubb3rDucc | 2026-02-15 19:16:17+00:00
This thread hits very close to home for me. I'm engineering the frontend for a grocery list app as a capstone project right now and I'm handling a lot of the product and feature decisions, and the discussion about "just prompt Claude to build it" versus the reality of those decisions is something my team deals with constantly.

The example of reverse-engineering your grocery store's API and building a custom solution is awesome, and it's exactly the kind of thing that's now possible. But what I've found is that even with AI assistance, there are so many interconnected decisions that make this more than a one-shot prompt project.

I pushed for us to build a mobile app specifically to take advantage of portability (use it at home for planning, at the store for shopping) and the camera (image recognition with OpenAI and scanning barcodes with expo-camera). That sounds simple, but it cascades into hundreds of UX decisions about offline-first architecture, gesture patterns, camera permissions, and more.

The units and quantities problem mentioned in this thread is just the tip of the iceberg. I'm trying to figure out a data model that mirrors how people naturally think about groceries: how they categorize items, how they plan meals versus staples versus impulse buys, how they track what's running low. Modeling those mental models is genuinely hard.

What helps is that I worked as an ecommerce shopper at Whole Foods, and I learned that stores are meticulously organized with numbered bays and predetermined routes optimized for efficiency. Translating that knowledge into a system that can intelligently sort a shopping list based on store layout (which varies by location!) and typical shopping patterns is genuinely complex.

One of my teammates put it well: this is a simple idea, but it requires a level of care, expertise, and experience to get it right. AI's incredibly helpful for implementing solutions once we've made these decisions, but the decisions themselves require domain knowledge, user research, and taste. That's the part that's hard to automate, and it's what makes this a real engineering project rather than a weekend Claude experiment.
by dmurray | 2026-02-15 19:16:37+00:00
It looks extremely accessible. I can puzzle through the pages I looked at with school-level Irish.

The script can be mechanically translated to the modern characters, no ambiguity there. The spelling and grammar isn't the perfectly standardized Irish introduced in the 1940s and 50s - which isn't representative of how anyone ever spoke the language - but its differences are those a good to mediocre student might make anyway while trying to write the official standard.

It helps that this is clearly written for a YA audience. Literary Irish has lots of complicated constructions and idioms which are difficult to translate, but this does not.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-02-15 19:16:56+00:00
> Greatly appreciate this direct statement clarifying your standards, and yet another reason that I hope Ars can remain a strong example of quality journalism in a world where that is becoming hard to find

> Kudos to ARS for catching this and very publicly stating it.

> Thank you for upholding your journalistic standards. And a note to our current administration in DC - this is what transparency looks like.

> Thank you for upholding the standards of journalism we appreciate at ars!

> Thank you for your clarity and integrity on your correction. I am a long time reader and ardent supporter of Ars for exactly these reasons. Trust is so rare but also the bedrock of civilization. Thank you for taking it seriously in the age of mass produced lies.

> I like the decisive editorial action. No BS, just high human standards of integrity. That's another reason to stick with ARS over news feeds.

There is some criticism, but there is also quite a lot of incredible glazing.
by lyu07282 | 2026-02-15 19:16:59+00:00
that sounds good in theory, but in practice almost every country in europe has already fully bought into Palantir tech so you are a bit late with that. Europol has used "Palantir Gotham" for a decade at this point. The idea of western nations national sovereignty is an illusion. Most european journalists wouldn't need to be told not to report badly about Palantir, that's the only thing that makes this story an outlier.
by zkmon | 2026-02-15 19:17:03+00:00
If you look at the backyards (so called garden) of homes of the advanced countries, from satellite maps, they mostly became junkyards of things. Inside homes are full of things that are rarely used. I have seen Amazon boxes going into bins unopened. Basically, homes are overflowing with goods, and throwing things away is going to become expensive. Advances in manufacturing, supply chains and online shopping have accelerated the saturation of markets.

Destruction of goods can't be stooped due the pace of inflow of inventory. This is like a conveyor belt jamming, where the downstream belts are draining slower than upstream ones.
by b00twhy | 2026-02-15 19:17:04+00:00
Excellent. Easier for the public to make sure they stay there.

Cement over their bunker doors from the outside.

Park armed drones on the opposite side of their literal moat.

With the end of jobs coming, 10s of millions will be freed up to remind the tiny mega-rich portion of the species their meat suits were never essential. Just coddled by political handouts.
by plutodev | 2026-02-15 19:17:14+00:00
This is seriously exciting.

CPNs feel like a perfect match for the LLM era. The more agents write coordination code, the more we need hard structural guarantees — not just smarter models. Tests and compilers help, but CPNs push correctness into the architecture itself.

What I really like here is the concurrency angle. Guards + multi-token joins encode resource constraints directly in the graph. That’s way cleaner than the usual mix of rate-limit maps, retry queues, cooldown trackers, and ad-hoc locks.

The scraper scheduler bet makes total sense. That’s exactly the kind of coordination-heavy system where CPN semantics could reduce complexity while increasing correctness.

Now here’s where it gets interesting from an infra perspective.

If you’re building:
• Simulation-heavy CPN systems
• Distributed token execution
• Partitioned CPN runtimes
• LLM agents constrained by CPN state transitions

You’ll eventually hit scaling questions.

That’s where something like io.net becomes strategically relevant.

Because io.net isn’t just about GPUs it’s about distributed, flexible compute infrastructure. If you’re experimenting with:
• Running partitioned CPN executors across nodes
• Simulating large-scale timed Petri nets
• Stress-testing concurrency models
• Running LLM-constrained coordination systems

You need infra that’s scalable and composable without locking you into a hyperscaler model.

CPNs + distributed compute + LLM-constrained execution is actually a powerful combo.

This direction feels like:
Formal methods × Agent systems × Distributed infra.

And that’s a very interesting intersection.
by linsomniac | 2026-02-15 19:17:37+00:00
>I can bet that a single standard instance of existing tool like codex and Claude Code

This is a perfect example of what I'm saying. You'd bet that, because you don't have enough experience with the tooling to know when you need more than a "standard instance of existing tool"

Here's a real-world case: Take some 20 year old Python code and have it convert "% format" strings to "f strings". Give that problem to a generic Claude Code setup and it will produce some subtle bugs. Now set up a "skill" that understands how to set up and test the resulting f-string against the %-format, and it will be able to detect and correct errors it introduces, automatically. And it can do that without inflating the main context.

Many of those items I mention are at their core about managing context. If you are finding Claude Code ends up "off in the weeds", this can often be due to you not managing the context windows correctly.

Just knowing when to clear context, when to compact context, and when to preserve context is a core component of successfully using the AI tooling.
by ericmcer | 2026-02-15 19:18:05+00:00
It would not be a good idea because the goal of companies are not to get you to consume only what you need, they want you to consume more.

You should check out "Ascension" (it is on Paramount unfortunately). It gives a pretty close up look at China and factory culture and how their entire country is mobilized to push maximum consumption. The corporation's don't view Americans high per-capita consumption as a problem but instead wonder how to drive the rest of the world to consume the same absurd amount. It gives you a sort of fly on the wall view of the whole thing and it really makes you question what kind of psychotic road we are barreling down.

I agree with you about food though. I care about food and healthcare, very occasionally transportation. Can we focus on those instead of all the bullshit "amenities" corporations are churning out, are we really gonna decimate the planet for clothes, cosmetics and plastic conveniences?
by j0057 | 2026-02-15 19:18:25+00:00
Odd that there's no link to the retracted article.

Thread on Arstechnica forum: https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/editor%E2%80%99s-note-...

The retracted article: https://web.archive.org/web/20260213194851/https://arstechni...
by add-sub-mul-div | 2026-02-15 19:18:27+00:00
It's embarrassing for them to put out such a boilerplate "apology" but even more embarrassing to take it at its word.

It's such a cliche that they should have apologized in a human enough way that it didn't sound like the apology was AI generated as well. It's one way they could have earned back a small bit of credibility.