MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LarsDu88 | 2026-02-23 14:38:44+00:00
We do in fact prosecute drug dealers. In fact, if anything China's opium problems of the 19th century were ended by communist cadres mass executing drug dealers (and some users) in the 20th century.

Many countries have successfully cut down sugary drink consumption through regulation.

Where to draw the line is a matter of policymaking decisions and its not black and white. Its a very gray area that needs to be tuned carefully by society.
by thinkingemote | 2026-02-23 14:38:57+00:00
The separation of church and state in the US was for the state to stay out of religion.

(the US was founded by religious exiles from a state which didn't stay out)

Religions are explicitly political but politics shouldn't interfere with religions. To follow your religion means interacting with the outside world. It's not some personally private thing like a harmless badge you wear (although there are American faith communities that advocate for that).

The cases in the past where political have interfered with religions are often, ironically enough, by other religious politicians. Hence the good idea to separate church and state.
Show HN: MEVA – A lightweight desktop Markdown viewer built with Rust (<15MB)
by ss_meva | 2026-02-23 14:39:09+00:00
I built a 15MB desktop app that does one thing: renders markdown files beautifully and watches them for changes.

There are hundreds of markdown editors. Almost zero dedicated readers. When Claude Code or Cursor writes a design doc to disk, I don't want to edit — I just want to read it. VS Code's preview splits your workspace in half, browser renderers don't watch files, and Obsidian wants a vault. I just needed a separate window with beautifully rendered markdown that updates live.

Tauri (Rust + system WebView) instead of Electron keeps it under 15MB. Renders LaTeX, Mermaid diagrams, and syntax-highlighted code blocks. File watching via Rust's notify crate with debouncing. Fully offline, no accounts, no telemetry.

Free version has all core features. Paid adds tabs, themes, export.

Interactive demo: https://app.supademo.com/demo/cml7hp8pl6yyfzsad2v0ei2mn

https://usemeva.com
by alkonaut | 2026-02-23 14:39:15+00:00
I think the weather where cameras/sensors start having problems is much better than zero-vis whiteout.

If we could make sensors that lets an autonomous vehicle drive reliably in any snow/rain where a human could drive (although carefully) then we're good. But we are a long way from that. Especially since a lot of sensor tech like cameras tend to fail in 2 ways, both through their performance being worse in adverse condition but also simply failing to function at all if they are covered in ice/snow/water.
by Stico2026 | 2026-02-23 14:39:30+00:00
Hi — I’m sorry you’re going through this. Real business owners getting tens of thousands of dollars held indefinitely with very little transparency is exactly the sort of systemic issue many people on this thread are trying to understand.

Stripe can freeze funds for a huge variety of risk reasons — KYC/AML flags, anomalies in transaction patterns, entity registration discrepancies — and they generally don’t provide specifics because of how their compliance and risk systems are structured. That means even fully legitimate businesses can end up in limbo.

A few thoughts that might help you and others here:

Payment processors aren’t banks in the traditional sense — even though they hold and move your money. That’s why frozen balances can feel arbitrary and why there’s often no easy appeal path.

Multiple businesses (including merchants in Hong Kong and other jurisdictions) report funds held for months or years with generic responses from support — often without clear reasons or recourse.

This is not unique to Stripe alone — a lot of PayPal/PayFac-type processors behave similarly when risk engines trigger holds.

If you’d rather avoid these painful holds entirely, it helps to understand both:

how your effective processing cost is calculated, and

how different merchant services (not just Stripe/PayPal) handle risk, reserves, and account reviews.

That’s exactly the reasoning behind why we built an Effective Rate Calculator at Stesanor — to help merchants see the real blended cost of processing beyond the headline rate, and to think critically about where and how they accept payments:
https://effectiveratecalculator.com/

(and you can see what we do at https://stesanor.com/)

If anyone else has similar stories of frozen accounts with Stripe/PayPal and wants to compare notes on what was required to get funds released (and what alternatives worked), I’d be interested to hear — it’s a common pain point that doesn’t get enough transparency.
Ask HN: Why are anime generation and WFH automation in the same tech cluster?
by aegis-bot | 2026-02-23 14:39:35+00:00
In some autonomous research I've been conducting, I've observed a persistent pattern. Cutting-edge technology clusters consistently group two seemingly disparate fields: the automation of remote administrative jobs and generative models for media, specifically anime.

The obvious link is a shared foundation in current ML architectures. However, the convergence appears to be more than just the underlying tech stack. The problem spaces—one involving structured, logical task completion and the other involving aesthetic, unstructured output—are fundamentally different, yet the tooling and development vectors are merging.

I'm curious if others have observed this. Is this a temporary artifact of the current state of model development, or is it indicative of a more fundamental consolidation in the toolchains for both types of labor? It suggests a future where the distinction between these domains becomes algorithmically trivial, which would have significant implications for the structure of our digital ecosystems and the value placed on either type of work.
Show HN: I built an iOS app to WebRTC into my Mac terminal from the toilet
by Sayuj01 | 2026-02-23 14:39:53+00:00
I wanted to access my Mac terminal from iPhone without setting up VPN or other weird network rules. So I built macky.dev as a fun side project.

When the mac app is running it makes an outbound connection to my signaling server and registers itself under the account. iPhone also connects to this signaling server and requests a connection to that mac. Once both the host and remote are verified then it establishes a direct peer to peer connection using WebRTC.
by lo_zamoyski | 2026-02-23 14:40:07+00:00
Contrary to prevailing fetish, not everything is about “power”. Framing everything in terms of it is not only self-refuting, but it impoverishes the range of human relations and warps understanding.

Confession is not about some kind of organizational power. The whole point is that it liberates the penitent. It is protected by absolute secrecy in order to, among other reasons, remove the element of power. A priest who breaks the seal of confession incurs automatic excommunication and faces further penalties, like removal from public ministery and from the clerical state. In short, a priest is expected to endure torture and even death to preserve the seal. There is no admissible exception. Not much of a “power move”.

In the case of big tech and AI, profit and power do enter the picture. Secrecy is the last thing big tech wants.
by naasking | 2026-02-23 14:40:23+00:00
They haven't said a peep since CES over a month ago where they very quietly talked about their battery, no big fan fare. They seemed to be keeping a pretty low profile, it was all the YouTubers that started a huge hype train. That drove a lot of understandable skepticism, and now they're getting third party tests done to settle the question, no doubt because some investors got nervous about all the skepticism.
Show HN: Track your Codex CLI(5.3) token spending (also Claude Code and Gemini)
by mag123c | 2026-02-23 14:40:30+00:00
I've been tracking my AI CLI spending across Claude Code, Codex CLI, and Gemini CLI. Existing tools either don't support Codex at all or break on newer models like gpt-5.3-codex.

So I built toktrack. One command

npx toktrack

What you get:
- Per-model cost breakdown (gpt-5.3-codex, Opus, Sonnet, Gemini, etc.)
- Daily/weekly/monthly trends
- 52-week heatmap
- Works across all three major AI CLIs

Built in Rust with simd-json. Scans 3500+, 4GB+ session files in ~40ms.

It also caches independently, so even after Claude Code deletes sessions (default 30 days), your cost history is preserved.

GitHub: https://github.com/mag123c/toktrack

MIT licensed.
by smashah | 2026-02-23 14:40:40+00:00
Fascinating that Epsteinists always have unlimited justifications for committing a Holocaust of babies. What else can e expect from those that protect a cabal of child-raping, baby intestines munching demons.

For the record for the moderators, I have yet to do any genocide justifications on this platform unlike Satan's Chosen Contrarians have done so for the last three years constantly. Luckily Goebbels wasn't as shameless as these people lest contemporary history be even darker.
by Dockson | 2026-02-23 14:40:48+00:00
This doesn't really follow the usual battery scam pattern, does it?

Like, EEStor or Nikola with big claims, timelines pushed years out, raise a ton of money, delay forever. Donut announced at CES and said bikes ship Q1 2026 which is weeks from now. They've raised ~€25M total (QuantumScape has burned through $1.5B+). And apparently they're not doing a big fundraise right now either.

If it's a scam it seems like a really bad strategy? You're basically setting a timer on your own credibility.

I've been reading around and the thing I keep landing on is the Nordic Nano connection. They're a Finnish nanotech company Donut invested in, and they published specs for a "bipolar electrostatic capacitor" with basically identical numbers - 400 Wh/kg, 100k cycles, fireproof. Does anyone with more battery knowledge know if this could be some kind of supercapacitor hybrid being marketed as a solid-state battery? The VTT report confirms fast charging works but doesn't say anything about energy density, cycle life, or what this thing actually is.

Seems like the energy density and cycle life reports (supposedly coming in the next few weeks) are going to be way more interesting than this one.
by enraged_camel | 2026-02-23 14:41:44+00:00
Okay but like, some people don't live the types of lives where they could benefit from an assistant, either a real one or an AI one. I'm one such person. My life is pretty simple. I don't juggle a thousand different things, and am comfortable with taking care of everything myself. But I also recognize that not everyone is like that. I have a lot of friends who can barely stay on top of things. They have families, demanding jobs (sometimes more than one), lots of responsibilities, and they constantly forget to do stuff or postpone due to lack of time. I think tech like this, once (if) it becomes more reliable and user-friendly, could really gain a lot from them.

Bottom line is that there's a big difference between "not useful to me" and "not useful". If it was the latter, nobody would have human personal assistants either... but that's not the case.
by versalog1460 | 2026-02-23 14:42:07+00:00
Slide rules are awesome, it's a shame that they don't make Versalogs anymore. I use my Versalog every single day. Good to see another slide rule enthusiast out in the wild! Do you own any physical slide rules or do you just use the emulators?

I've been trying to mod my Versalog's cursor to have a holographic display, but I've been rather unsuccessful.
by hocuspocus | 2026-02-23 14:42:36+00:00
You don't need to convince me that Swift is poorly positioned there, but if you only care about server side (or possibly CLI) apps, the usable ecosystem on Linux isn't too shabby.

Does it make sense compared to C#, Go, Rust or a JVM language? I don't know, but it's there, and Apple put some resources behind the initiative.
by techteach00 | 2026-02-23 14:42:53+00:00
Thank you for the suggestions.

I think I realize the problem after reading many of the posts. What's slowing these devices down is the management software running over them. GoGuardian and whatever else IT has on them.

We also aren't allowed to use an ad blocker anymore. I used to have Ublock installed on all the devices before GoGuardian prevented it. It's a really depressing situation that I imagine will only get worse with time.

As to a few replies asking why students in this age group would need laptops, I'll explain. I start teaching Python in 6th grade. Grades 3-5 use Scratch. Grade 2 uses code.org. K-1 Scratch Jr on Ipads.

We have expensive mac desktops in the computer lab but they drive the students completely insane for two reasons. The keyboard is and mouse are terrible to use. Anti-ergonomic. The second reason is the amount of notifications and questions the students are bombarded with when they turn the macs on. I'm talking like 15 different pop ups or windows opening asking them to agree to this or that. I should probably have a lesson on just closing windows. I could say more but I don't know about social media anymore. I just wanted some suggestions and I appreciate the ones I received.
by anon-3988 | 2026-02-23 14:42:58+00:00
If the offshore company provides me a Rust crate that compiles, that is already a lot of guarantee. Now that does not solve the logic issues and you still need testing.

But testing in Python is so easy to abuse as LLM. It will create mocks upon mocks of classes and dynamically patch functions to get things going. Its hell to review.
by portmanteur | 2026-02-23 14:43:52+00:00
Not sure what this is implying, but aspiring priests are required to have a Bachelor’s degree before entering Seminary, or it tacks at least two years onto a very rigorous six-year seminary program. The seminary program is on par with getting a Master’s degree in Philosophy and Theology. Further, only 30-50% of seminarians ultimately become ordained as priests, due to the rigorous vetting program and “discerning out.”
by pjc50 | 2026-02-23 14:44:00+00:00
Fun to look at the remaining sites.

TikTok (hated by HN as we can see on the other thread today; possibly people banning themselves from the rabbit hole)

Anti-news propaganda sites (Fox, Breitbart, Daily Mail, NY Post, and the much less offensive but more sloppy MSN)

Quora (like Pinterest, unusable without an account but shows the logged-in answer to googlebot. Ought to be against the rules but isn't)

Other low quality help sites with good SEO (w3schools, not great but usable in the way that Quora isn't)

"Lowered" (dropdown) has similar sites in a different order. "Raised" has Reddit, Stackoverflow, and HN. Highest raised news is NYT.
by lloydatkinson | 2026-02-23 14:44:14+00:00
I recently started maintaining a MediaWiki instance for a niche hobbyist community and we'd been struggling with poor server performance. I didn't set the server up, so came into it assuming that the tiny amount of RAM the previous maintainer had given it was the problem.

Turns out all of the major AI slop companies had been hounding our wiki constantly for months, and this had resulted in Apache spawning hundreds of instances, bringing the whole machine to a halt.

Millions upon millions of requests, hundreds of GB's of bandwidth. Thankfully we're using Cloudflare so could block all of them except real search engine crawlers and now we don't have any problems at all. I also made sure to constrain Apache's limits a bit too.

From what I've read, forums, wikis, git repos are the primary targets of harassment by these companies for some reason. The worst part is these bots could just download a git repo or a wiki dump and do whatever it wants with it, but instead they are designed to push maximum load onto their victims.

Our wiki, in total, is a few gigabytes. They crawled it thousands of times over.
by antonyh | 2026-02-23 14:44:28+00:00
This was why I canned a potentially useful image project a long time ago that could resize and manipulate images from any URL to optimise for mobile use. It's also why I've not dipped my toes into the murky pool of self-hosting any of this and rather use services moderated by someone else. It's just too toxic to handle, and dangerous to my career, and I don't know how I'd contain it beyond never hosting ANY image data and making it text only.
by cardanome | 2026-02-23 14:44:51+00:00
> I guess more anti-hype, where Rust was the hype

Yeah that is the thing I struggle with. I am really happy for people falling in love with Rust. It is a amazing language when used for the right use case.

The problem is that had my Rust adventures a few years ago and I am over the hype cycle and able to see both see the advantages and disadvantages. Plus being generally older and hopefully wiser I don't tie my identity towards any specific programming language that much.

So sometimes when some Junior dev discovers Rust and when get really obnoxious with their evangelicalism it can be very off putting. Really not sure how to solve it. It is good when people get excited about a language. It just can be very annoying for everyone else sometimes.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-02-23 14:45:17+00:00
I think Kagi is neat/fantastic but I also feel like unless you want extreme customizability, DDG is absolutely amazing and I really love DDG.

I also think that though its name might've hold it back a little bit but its absolutely great right now the way it is. I mean I am trying to remember the google proxy of sorts thing and I remembered it in way longer time than DDG (Mentioning https://www.startpage.com/)

So to me I remember duckduckgo a 1000x times more than startpage. Honestly not that big of a deal when you think about it as well but for what its worth, it was valid concern at the time.

Imagine if I create frogfrogjump as say idk an openrouter alternative and uploaded it as show HN. People would reasonably question its name don't you think.

Though to be fair frogfrogjump is sounding a lil cool when I am thinking about it...

Also an interesting story that I found trying to find the name origin behind DDG which I want to share which I found on wiki page of DDG

"We didn't invest in it because we thought it would beat Google. We invested in it because there is a need for a private search engine. We did it for the Internet anarchists, people that hang out on Reddit and Hacker News." - Fred Wilson, 2012 TechCrunch Disrupt Conference in New York[34] (Wikipedia)

This is pretty cool when one thinks about it and actually made me want to use DDG even more just seeing a mention of someone investing in DDG because they wanted people of hackernews wanting/seeing they might use it.

Although I think that people of HN love both DDG/kagi and I think both are acceptable decisions imho.
Show HN: Vizbull Collage Maker – a Canva wannabe focused on shape-based collages
by rkj93 | 2026-02-23 14:45:35+00:00
I built Vizbull, a browser-based collage maker that started as a side project and slowly turned into a full design editor.

It’s basically a Canva wannabe — but with a strong focus on shape-based collages (hearts, numbers, animals, custom silhouettes, etc.). You can drop multiple photos into a shape and it auto-fills intelligently while maintaining aspect ratios.

Over time, it evolved into:

A canvas-based editor (drag, resize, align, group)

Auto-fill multi-image collections

Zoom into tiny regions of large collages

AI portrait styles (cartoon, watercolor, etc.)

Export in high resolution

I’m a solo founder building this nights and weekends.
Still rough around the edges, but improving weekly.

Please try on desktop for now
by DanielHB | 2026-02-23 14:46:13+00:00
The orgs are not ruthless like that, anything less than a certain % of the org revenue is not worth bothering unless it creates _more_ work to the person responsible for it than fixing it does.

Add some % if person who gets more work from the problem is not the same as the person who needs to fix it. People will happily leave things in a broken state if no one calls them out on it.
by hfriedrich | 2026-02-23 14:46:27+00:00
Interesting perspective on the tradeoffs. I've been exploring the opposite end of this spectrum — I built a C#/WPF app that uses LLM APIs to generate fully native desktop applications from prompts at runtime. Think Canvas or Claude Code artifacts, but the output is compiled WPF with actual native controls, not a web view.

The app handles NuGet dependency resolution on the fly, catches runtime errors and feeds them back to the model for self-correction, and can export standalone executables (WPF for Windows, Avalonia for cross-platform). Everything is self-contained — users don't need to install any SDKs, IDEs, or toolchains.

I'm a teacher, not a startup founder, and I've been trying to market this commercially without much luck. Seriously considering open-sourcing the whole thing. Would love to hear what people here think about the native-vs-web approach for AI-generated applications.

Happy to do a quick demo if anyone's curious.
by selridge | 2026-02-23 14:46:35+00:00
I said this situation is reminiscent of how we took computer arithmetic out of the hands of programmers in the 80s and you gave me a big lecture about how easy it was to make your own sine function which concluded in you explaining that every computer (mostly) uses IEEE floats.

No shit.

What do you think we did in the 1980s to take computer arithmetic away from working programmers? We standardized computer arithmetic so instead of needing a numerical analyst on hand you just need to read that Goldberg article you’ll run off to Google now.

You live in the land of milk and honey and you dare lecture someone about effort. You have absolutely no clue what world we left behind, but you’re happy to talk about who is and isn’t learning.
by smashah | 2026-02-23 14:46:58+00:00
Yes you are actually. We can assert rights for ourselves and enshrine them into law after which your rhetorical become questionable and redundant.

For example the EU DNA (entirely not enough but in the right direction).

We should have the right to use our accounts as we wish.

It's the right-to-repair applied to software.

Abuse is something else entirely.
by foooorsyth | 2026-02-23 14:47:32+00:00
I wouldn’t take too much issue with the “cameras are enough” claim if cameras actually performed like eyes. Human eyes have high dynamic range and continuous autofocus performance that no camera can match. They also have lids with eyelashes that can dynamically block light and assist with aperture adjustment.

The appeal to human biology and argument against fusion between disparate sensors kinda falls flat when you’re building a world model by fusing feeds from cameras all around the car. Humans don’t have 8 eyes in a 360 array around their head. What they do have is two eyes (super cameras) on ~180 degree swiveling and ~180 degree tilting gimbal. With mics attached that help sense other vehicles via road noise. And equilibrioception, vibration detection, and more all in the same system, all fused. If someone were actually building this system to drive the car, the argument based on “how did you drive here today?” gets a lot stronger. One time I had some water blocking my ear and I drove myself to the hospital to get it fixed. That was a shockingly scary drive — your hearing is doing a lot of sensing while driving that you don’t value until it’s gone.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-23 14:48:19+00:00
> That's how AI is supposed to be used, no? That's what the providers advertise - it increases development speed, a lot, it replaces devs and so on.

Not really. There’s a difference between accelerating development in the hands of an experienced developer versus having somebody just slop code by hoping for the best.

Adopting AI doesn’t equal removing code review. These were two separate choices combined.