MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by iancarroll | 2026-02-14 22:33:46+00:00
Verizon did manage to convince the FCC that this was enough a problem to change their settlement agreement[0] requiring more frequent unlocks. If you believe their numbers, they lost 700,000 phones to fraud in 2023, although a lot of those were probably any unlocked phone that defaulted on its payments.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/fcc-revises-v...
by fuzzy2 | 2026-02-14 22:33:59+00:00
It’s not. And it gets worse. A WinGet package can suddenly be introduced for software you have already installed and then the next "update all" will install whatever. Could be something completely different!

WinGet is not only unreliable, it is but one step removed from Remote Code Execution as a Service. Well, maybe one-and-a-half, if package repo maintainers were to pay attention, but that’s not realistic.
by TFYS | 2026-02-14 22:34:07+00:00
> Europe faced a worse Russian threat during the Cold War without giving up national sovereignty.

That's because Europe could rely on the power of the US back then. If the US was just a patchwork of small independent states, Europe would very likely be a part of USSR now.

> Cooperation and military alliances do not require national suicide.

It may if your opponent is a single large country. Cooperation between many nations each looking out for their own best interests is a lot lot harder and slower than a single command structure. An alliance like that can't win against a more united enemy. The enemy can simply focus on manipulating the small weak countries individually to hamstring the alliance, as has been happening.

I would not want to be a small country caught between larger powers fighting each other, that's never a good position to be in. You'll just be a pawn on the board, getting pushed into proxy wars and civil wars by the bigger powers playing the game. I'd rather give up sovereignty willingly to be a part of a large power and a player in the game, and not on the board being played.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-14 22:34:37+00:00
Well the difference is that a private company doesn’t have a full army, masked jack booted thugs who shoot people with abandon with “qualified immunity” and the legal right of force to take away my property without a trial (civil forfeiture) or prosecute me because they don’t like me (see the current administration).

They also can’t stop me because I don’t “look like I belong” in my neighborhood (true story). I’d rather not give the government any more power.
by michaelteter | 2026-02-14 22:34:50+00:00
I absolutely LOVED this game when it first came out. I played with a trackball + keyboard, and the 6 degrees of freedom, paired with an environment where there often was no natural sense of "up" or "down" (zero gravity, inside tunnels) really blew my mind. I experienced a sensation I had never before experienced, almost out-of-body.

For example, you approach a "T" junction, and depending on your pitch angle, the branches may be up/down or left/right. But since there's no natural ground or sky, you can either maintain an orientation memory (I usually did automatically), or you can just let all that go and travel with no sense of true orientation.

Occasionally you reach an area with some signs or printed panels, and then you realize what the regional up/down orientation was; but it didn't matter in zero gravity.
by Mnexium | 2026-02-14 22:35:33+00:00
I’m working on Mnexium, a memory + context layer for AI apps.

It handles persistent chat history, long-term semantic memory, user profiles, agent state, and rolling summarization.

It sits between your app and the model and works across OpenAI, Claude, and Gemini — you can switch models without losing context and still maintain memories.

The goal is to stop every team from re-implementing slightly broken memory systems, and to make memory user-owned and portable instead of tied to a single model or vendor.

Currently live with JS/TS and Python SDKs.
Looking for feedback if anyone has any - good idea, bad idea? etc.

https://mnexium.com
by gnatolf | 2026-02-14 22:36:05+00:00
More specifically regarding spec-driven development:

There's a good reason that most successful examples of those tools like openspec are to-do apps etc. As soon as the project grows to 'relevant' size of complexity, maintaining specs is just as hard as whatever other methodology offers. Also from my brief attempts - similar to human based coding, we actually do quite well with incomplete specs. So do agents, but they'll shrug at all the implicit things much more than humans do. So you'll see more flip-flopped things you did not specify, and if you nail everything down hard, the specs get unwieldy - large and overly detailed.
by jamesbelchamber | 2026-02-14 22:36:05+00:00
One important point is that many people die WITH cancer but not OF cancer. So even for the 1.8%, only a fraction of those people were going to die of the disease (or even suffer significant symptoms) - the rest were just going to die of natural causes anyway.

But now you've found it you pretty much have to remove it, which has significant quality of life implications.
by simianwords | 2026-02-14 22:36:08+00:00
I can't read the article, but I feel people are missing the point here.

Slack is a really really good product because it is simple enough and works nice - performant, has just enough features but not too many and the UX/UI is good.

Its not a power tool but it gets the job done without getting in the way. You would know what I mean if you have used teams/ google chat etc.

Sure you can criticise slack for being a bit slow, not having nested threads.

For context: slack is the main app I use at work and spend a * lot * of time there.

But OpenAI _can_ beat Slack at these things if they have the technical acumen. But real differentiator comes in having an all in one platform that can help you run workflows. Recall that ChatGPT UI is fundamentally a chat box. If ChatGPT can integrate common workflows like

- send an email to a colleague for something

- schedule a meeting at a certain time

- deploy to production

- approve leaves

- create quick code changes with natural language like "change threshold to 50 in my repo"

- integration with observability and alerting

Then you don't have to leave this tool at all. There's a lot of potential here.

I frequently want to just tag GPT when using slack. Like "hey take this jira task and create a quick pull request" and it will link the pull request in the thread.

Or when my colleague asks me for a meeting, I can tag GPT with something like "hey schedule a meeting later in the day when we both have time".
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-02-14 22:36:40+00:00
I do this outbound filtering but I don't use a computer running Windows or MacOS to do it

It doesn't make sense to expect the companies promoting Windows or MacOS to allow the user to potentially interfere with their "services" and surveillance business model

Windows and MacOS both "phone home" (unfiltered outgoing connections). If computer owners running these corporate OS were given an easy way to stop this, then it stands to reason that owners would stop the connections back to the mothership. That means loss of surveillance potential and lost revenue

As of 2006, still nothing stops anyone from setting the gateway of their computer running a corporate OS to point to a computer running a non-corporate OS that can do the outbound filtering
by fuzzy2 | 2026-02-14 22:36:54+00:00
You can have that, and in an even better way: Simply disable the blight that is Windows 11 context menus and go back to real context menus.

I’m not even joking, they are basically superior in every way. They open faster, they have only one visual axis and they support all the shell extensions you remember. (Too many shell extensions could make them just as slow though.)
by Barrin92 | 2026-02-14 22:37:05+00:00
which is why the most famous book in the world of software development pointed out that the long term success of a software project is not defined by man hours or lines of code written but by documentation, clear interfaces and the capacity to manage the complexity of a project.

Maybe they need to start handing out copies of the mythical man month again because people seem to be oblivious to insights we already had a few decades ago
Ask HN: Want to move to use a "dumb" phone. How to make the switch?
by absoluteunit1 | 2026-02-14 22:37:39+00:00
Hi

I’m curious if anyone here has successfully moved to using a dumb phone. By dumb phone - I mean literally texting / calling only. No internet, etc.

Immediate isssues I see is not being able to use Authenticator apps. Not being able to use maps. Etc.

Has anyone made the switch and how to best go about it?
by jmward01 | 2026-02-14 22:38:34+00:00
I totally agree. US healthcare is broken and costs aren't tied to the reality of how expensive something actually is. I have very high hopes that modern medicine is in for a massive disruptive change where things like full body MRI, along with analysis, could be done very cheap and with no admin overhead. In that model 'we see something we aren't sure of. It is probably nothing but to be sure we want to do follow-ups' is far less of a problem.

A lot of this however is how it is discussed with the patient. Discussions about the likelihood of there being a real issue when something is seen need to be clear and informative without being alarming. 'We did a routine scan and these often show transient artifacts that turn out to be nothing, but in an abundance of caution we want to do a followup' is totally different than 'we saw something we are concerned about and need to do a followup'. How things are messaged really matters.
by nomilk | 2026-02-14 22:39:18+00:00
The title could be dead wrong; the tripling of junior jobs might not be due to the limits of AI, but because of AI increasing the productivity of juniors to that of a mid or senior (or at least 2-3x-ing the output of juniors), thus making hiring juniors an appealing prospect to increase the company's output relative to competitors who aren't hiring in response to AI tech improvements. Hope this is the case and hope it happens across broadly across the economy. While the gutter press fear mongers of job losses, if AI makes the average employee much more useful (even if its via newly created roles), it's conceivable there's a jobs/salaries boom, including among those who 'lose their job' and move into a new one!
Show HN: Off Grid – Run AI text, image gen, vision offline on your phone
by ali_chherawalla | 2026-02-14 22:39:24+00:00
Your phone has a GPU more powerful than most 2018 laptops. Right now it sits idle while you pay monthly subscriptions to run AI on someone else's server, sending your conversations, your photos, your voice to companies whose privacy policy you've never read. Off Grid is an open-source app that puts that hardware to work. Text generation, image generation, vision AI, voice transcription — all running on your phone, all offline, nothing ever uploaded.

That means you can use AI on a flight with no wifi. In a country with internet censorship. In a hospital where cloud services are a compliance nightmare. Or just because you'd rather not have your journal entries sitting in someone's training data.

The tech: llama.cpp for text (15-30 tok/s, any GGUF model), Stable Diffusion for images (5-10s on Snapdragon NPU), Whisper for voice, SmolVLM/Qwen3-VL for vision. Hardware-accelerated on both Android (QNN, OpenCL) and iOS (Core ML, ANE, Metal).

MIT licensed. Android APK on GitHub Releases. Build from source for iOS.
by yorwba | 2026-02-14 22:39:35+00:00
No, now that LLMs are invented, a lot more people lying on the Internet have started to do so convincingly, so they also do it more often. Previously, when somebody was using all the right lingo to signal expert status, they might've been a lying expert or an honest expert, but they probably weren't some lying rando, because then they wouldn't even have thought of using those words in that context. But now LLMs can paper over that deficit, so all the lying randos who previously couldn't pretend to be an expert are now doing so somewhat successfully, and there are a lot of lying randos.

It's not "LLM bad" — it's "LLM good, some people bad, bad people use LLM to get better at bad things."
by simonw | 2026-02-14 22:40:26+00:00
This Deep Think one was so good that I did get suspicious that maybe it was at least rendering the SVG to an image and then "looking" at the image and tweaking it over a few iterations.

But the reasoning trace doesn't hint at that and looks legit to me: https://gist.github.com/simonw/7e317ebb5cf8e75b2fcec4d0694a8...

I also asked Deep Think what tools it has access to and it has Python and Bash but no internet access, and as far as I can tell that environment doesn't have any libraries or tools installed that can render an SVG to an image format that it could view.
by jqpabc123 | 2026-02-14 22:41:50+00:00
So they've got a product that everyone knows is inherently unreliable and generates BS/slop at will.

They have gotten this far by feeding BS to investors.

They've backed themselves into a corner where their only real alternative is to sell more BS.

The world is full of BS --- so the question is, how many people will pay big bucks for more of it? I'm guessing not too many. Dating apps are a promising possibility.
by mmh0000 | 2026-02-14 22:42:38+00:00
Many larger corporations strictly control what software is available and allowed to be installed.

On Linux, this is commonly accomplished using Red Hat Satellite [1], although many other tools are also available to use instead.

Getting approval to install something like Vim can literally take months of effort and arguing.

[1] https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_satellite/6...
by cbmuser | 2026-02-14 22:42:42+00:00
> As always with Zig posts, here come the haters. I really wonder why you even care about it.

It's another language stack that would need to be maintained within Linux distributions for years to come (security support, architecture support etc).

Upstream developers always seem to assume that there is no cost associated to introducing new software stacks. But in the end, someone has to maintain it. And they keep forgetting the purpose of software is to serve users, not developers.

And I'm not sure what's so revolutionary about Zig that couldn't have been solved by improving other languages.

For Zig in particular, the language isn't even stable enough that you can compile packages like Ghostty with any recent version of the Zig compiler. It has to be a very specific version of the compiler.
by cogman10 | 2026-02-14 22:43:20+00:00
This seems like a wild statement.

Age is a big factor in the with/of cancer factor. If someone is 80 years old then there's good chance it won't be cancer that kills them (assuming they aren't already in a late stage).

But if you are 40 and you have cancer, there's a good chance you'll die of that cancer if it's left untreated.

I'm personally of the opinion that cancer screening should happen earlier for younger people and less frequently for older people. Like, if you hit 80, there's really basically no reason to screen for cancer.
by Eisenstein | 2026-02-14 22:44:21+00:00
But everyone has been listening to your argument and doing what you are advocating for since Reagan and yet here we are.

Have you every thought about the fact that power doesn't just disappear? Someone is going to have control over the jackbooted thugs. Claiming democratic norms and public control over them is bad just ensures that they become the tools of a few people without any way to constrain them.

I'm sorry you had a bad experience and that we are currently having one as a country, but the solution is to push for more democracy, not more privatization.
by lazystar | 2026-02-14 22:45:16+00:00
i used to lose hours each day to typos, linting issues, bracket-instead-of-curly-bracket, 'was it the first parameter or the second parameter', looking up accumulator/anonymous function callback syntax AGAIN...

idk what ya'll are doing with AI, and i dont really care. i can finally - fiiinally - stay focused on the problem im trying to solve for more than 5 minutes.
by bazodedo | 2026-02-14 22:45:39+00:00
Some cheap and durable archival storage would be nice. Perhaps by storing data in grooves on ceramic discs. (Which is essentially what cds did). Though, preferably without high speed rotation, and reading more than one bit at a time by e.g. taking a picture of the surface through a microscope. How about 1 PB per disk?

I was wondering why we dont have something like that.

Unfortunately, it turns out that, with Blue-ray discs, we're already approaching the optics limit of what visible light (easily) gets us, and they're already cheating with multi-layer storage for the 100GB option. Thus youd need a complicated EUV or electron beam setup for smaller feature sizes.

Say i want my 1PB disk in cd format. A cd has r=6cm. Thus A~=100cm^2. A/1PB= 1.25e-18m^2= 1.25 nm^2, or about 5x5 atoms per bit :/

I guess we're better off by just scaling up flash production and stacking those elements vertically.

Edit: Turns out we need volumetric storage.
By using a material that is transparent to the laser wavelength, by intersecting two precisely focussed beams, the local intensity suffices to absorb two photons at once (stops being transparent) allowing you to select a volumetric point to interact with.
This allows a couple hundred of layers until refraction breaks our resolution.
by awesome_dude | 2026-02-14 22:49:05+00:00
As an ENG - I REALLY dislike teams - but I also dislike Slack

Slack should be emails that have been arranged into different folders - it just doesn't vibe with me for much otherwise (oo look you have 200 channels on unread - or, if you are the reverse, ooo look 200 channels with people chatting and I have to check every single one of them :(
by lifestyleguru | 2026-02-14 22:49:07+00:00
I don't understand why people allow so easily the increase of retirement age. I don't see the millenials in old age receiving any better healthcare as boomers are receiving right now. Stereotypical good public healthcare exists even in EU maybe only in 5-6 countries, in the rest it's 100 EUR for 5 minutes of doctor's attention.
by zdw | 2026-02-14 22:49:25+00:00
There are still places that benchmark, but mostly for commercial apps like Puget Systems in the earlier post. Phoronix can also be useful as well for benching open source stuff.

I wouldn't put much trust in well-known benchmark suites as in many cases proprietary compilers, a huge amount of effort was put into Goodhart's law optimizing to the exact needs of the benchmark.
by thrance | 2026-02-14 22:49:26+00:00
I would consider myself well on the left too, and I mostly agree with what you're saying. But I simply reject the premise that anti-immigration policies and the people who support them do anything to help curb the housing crisis or improve working conditions. Immigration can be a net positive for the general population, if it goes hand-in-hand with worker and tenant protections, etc.

> Corporations and the right are very much pro-immigration. Would you have expected that?

Corporations and the old right, maybe, but the new populist right is very much anti-immigration. It is their main talking point and platform in today's political landscape.
by marginalia_nu | 2026-02-14 22:51:13+00:00
Eh, you don't really need to trust any propaganda to see this. Set up an nginx on a public IP and tail its logs. Vulnerability scans will hit you literally non stop so long as it's a western IP. Block China and Russia IPs and it drops by like 90%.

Don't get me wrong the west isn't doing much to enforce Russian or Chinese complaints either. It's really just a messy situation all around.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-02-14 22:51:53+00:00
We're assuming we all somehow have perfect customers with technical knowledge who know exactly what they want and can express it as such, while gracefully accepting pushback over constraints brought up.

Anyone who's worked in a "bikeshed sensitive" stack of programming knows how quickly things railroad off when such customers get direct access to an engineer. Think being a fullstack dev but you constantly get requests over button colors while you're trying to get the database setup.
by WhitneyLand | 2026-02-14 22:52:27+00:00
“MRIs…suck at cancer”

Wrong? I understand MRIs are the standard for certain types of cancer like brain and spinal tumors.

With respect to whole body MRI they can be less effective because it’s not optimized, accuracy can be traded for area.

But as a general statement MRIs do not suck at cancer.
by sebmellen | 2026-02-14 22:52:39+00:00
Now the top comment on the GP comment is from a green account, and suspiciously the most upvoted. Also directly in-line with the AWS-related tool promotion… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47018665

@dang do you have any thoughts about how you’re performing AI moderation on HN? I’m very worried about the platform being flooded with these Submarine comments (as PG might call them).
by insin | 2026-02-14 22:53:04+00:00
Control Panel for YouTube [1] lets you remove most of the clutter from the Shorts player UI, or redirect Shorts to the normal player (using YouTube's internal navigation if on desktop, so no full page reload)

You'll have to disable hiding them first, as they're completly hidden by default

[1] https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube
by 1j01 | 2026-02-14 22:53:07+00:00
A few points of feedback:
- The keys you have to press are only shown once you press them, requiring trial and error unless you look at How To Play first.
- It feels weird to me to press keys that are far apart to hit notes that are visually close together.
- It needs a timing offset to sync the music to the gameplay. I had to purposefully delay my presses, or... play without music, which immediately improved my accuracy (49% -> 73%)
by the__alchemist | 2026-02-14 22:53:23+00:00
It is wild to me out the embedded engineering and robotics communities are isolated. Robotics includes mechanical engineering not part of embedded, but it seems the tools, outlook, and approaches between the two are different.

Starting, but not limited to a "T".(ROS: Robotics community; RTOS: Embedded community)

Involving anything managed by a GPOS (e.g. Linux) in robotics is something I would use with extreme caution, and for limited cases like a CV module.
by noldai | 2026-02-14 22:53:31+00:00
Hey HN! I'm the creator of SpecFact CLI.

The problem: We use AI to refactor legacy code, but regressions sneak through even with tests and type checking. Specs and backlog drift from reality. We needed a way to reverse engineer what the code actually does, then enforce those contracts.

What SpecFact does:
• Analyzes existing Python repos and extracts behavioral contracts (using icontract + beartype)
• Generates machine-readable specs from code (not the other way around)
• Runs as a CI quality gate to block regressions
• Works offline, zero account/API key required

This demo repo shows the full workflow: clone → run `uvx specfact-cli@latest import from-code demo-project --repo .` → see the generated specs and enforcement report.

Key differentiators:
- Brownfield-first: built for legacy code, not greenfield
- No-escape enforcement: quality gates can't be bypassed
- Contract exploration: automatically discovers edge cases with CrossHair
- Watch mode: bidirectional sync between specs and code

Tech stack: Python 3.11+, icontract, beartype, CrossHair for verification, published on PyPI.

The demo takes ~90 seconds to run and produces a concrete analysis report you can inspect. CI example included in .github/workflows/.

I'm around for questions and feedback. What would make this more useful for your brownfield projects?

Docs: https://docs.specfact.io
PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/specfact-cli/