MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Is GMO labeling planned product line segmentation?
by zippyman55 | 2026-02-11 16:13:21+00:00
At the local food bank, I notice that many of the canned soups say “contains genetically modified ingredients,” while premium brand ones frequently state “non-GMO” or “organic.”
I am not making any statement about GMOs themselves, but about product line signaling. This looks like a way to segment customers: price-sensitive buyers take the cheaper option, others self-select into higher-margin lines.
I observe many needy food bank individuals refusing the GMO soup cans.
Is there data on whether GMO labels influence willingness to pay more than actual cost differences? Or evidence this is intentional product-line strategy?
Links or firsthand experience welcome.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2026-02-11 16:13:33+00:00
bluntly: a lack of regulation mandating that consumer goods manufacturing responsibilities cover the lifecycle of the goods (including end-of-life).

yes i'm fully aware that recycling components is difficult and costly; if you truly believe in the market as an innovating force, you could stand to be a little more optimistic that we could make this a reality :)
by debo_ | 2026-02-11 16:14:05+00:00
Performance management isn't rating how people are doing. It's transforming the resources of the company into something that you want it to do. If they want to transform the current state of the company into something that has AI use as a core capability, that is performance management.

There are good books on this: e.g. https://www.amazon.ca/Next-Generation-Performance-Management...
by Apreche | 2026-02-11 16:14:09+00:00
This is why the saying has always been “reduce, reuse, recycle” in that order.

Reducing is the best. Don’t buy or make surplus stuff, and that reduces waste overall.

Reusing is second best. If we did make something, the best thing to do is get as much use out of it as possible to prevent it from ever becoming trash.

Recycling is the last resort. Regardless of what is being recycled, it is an expensive and difficult process to try to salvage any value from the waste materials rather than just abandoning them.

Because recycling electronics is such a difficult problem, if we want to reduce e-waste a better idea is to increase our efforts to reduce and reuse them as much as possible. Installing Linux on an old laptop to keep it useful for somebody is easy to do, and much more effective than trying to recycle it.
by toraway | 2026-02-11 16:14:16+00:00
I had been using Codex for a couple weeks after dropping Claude Code to evaluate as a baseline vs OpenCode and agreed, it is a very solid CLI that has improved a lot since it was originally released.

I mainly use OC just because I had refined my workflow and like reducing lock-in in general, but Codex CLI is definitely much more pleasant to use than CC.
by moshmage | 2026-02-11 16:14:20+00:00
The email is mandatory but you can input "no@no.no" - I placed it _before_ deciding i wouldn't make an account mandatory; Good catch, will be removed :)

For now, data sharing is via "export / import" (you can access it on the tools page) - It's not very robust, but I have yet to find a solution that doesn't involve me having a server receiving any kind of data (which is my north-star), I'm still exploring this as I ended up with the same problem as you: only I can control the data and my partner has to rely on me.

I'll send you a ping once I figure out a more robust and equally private way of sharing the data :)

ps: Thanks for the feedback!
by ricardo81 | 2026-02-11 16:14:31+00:00
I understand where you're coming from. I wasn't meaning from the context of the pseudo-smart person portraying that (which is obviously a thing, probably more obvious nowadays), but a person that is the real article. You meet all walks of life in your lifetime and that unattainable-ness of very smart people can come across as inaccessible, unexplainable or arrogant.

The kind of person that has spent much time chiselling their belief system or is simply fascinated by a field of study that not many people can relate to on that depth. Feynman was a great communicator, but I can think of a few people that may have Asperger's syndrome that have that exceptional insight into things that sometimes results in collateral damage in relationships.

What I mean is there are exceptional people, and sometimes people fail to understand what is exceptional and take exception themselves.

The political narrative of the time obviously was extra cynical about declarations of which team you're playing for, or non-declaration. That's what I meant about non-conformist, they're not interested in the politics.
by Yapping7880 | 2026-02-11 16:14:43+00:00
How do people read this drivel and take it seriously? I read the first 5 paragraphs of complete fluff, and then started skimming, and then realized it went on and on, and just closed it. The author had not gotten to any cogent point either within the first 5 paragraphs or the subsequent ones I skimmmed.
by throwway120385 | 2026-02-11 16:14:43+00:00
That's a really rigid way of thinking about it. Relationships are a negotiation, and if you stay in a committed one long enough you're going to find yourselves navigating some of these issues. If I'd only been seeing someone for a few weeks and their usual pattern was constant, immediate contact I'd assume there was something wrong. Some people tend to assume further that the problem is their fault. But that's a conversation you can have with your SO without giving them a counter-ultimatum.
by okandship | 2026-02-11 16:15:01+00:00
Hi HN, I built an open-source pipeline that turns AI model metadata into dark fantasy RPG character portraits, and here's the twist: each model generates its own.

How it works (4 stages):

1. Creator → Monster. GPT-5.2 plays "Dark Fantasy Loremaster", it analyzes the AI company's name and assigns a monster archetype + color palette. "Black Forest Labs" → Wyrdwood Witch-Hart. "ByteDance Seed" → Spriggan Code-Dancer. "xAI" → Rune-Eyed Homunculus.

2. Model → Item + Material. A second GPT-5.2 role ("Creative Art Director") maps each model's size and modality to a holdable item. Image models get weapons (small=dagger, large=greatsword). Video models get time/vision tools (hourglasses, mirrors). Audio gets resonance tools. 3D gets construction tools. So Qwen Image Max (large, image) → Colossal Calligrapher's Greatsword made of Starforged Brass.

3. Self-portrait. The model's own fal.ai endpoint generates a portrait of itself as the monster holding the item. FLUX.2 paints its own Witch-Hart. Seedream paints its own Spriggan. The prompt is literally just: {material} {monster} holding {item}.

4. Style unification. Every raw portrait gets restyled through Seedream v4.5's edit endpoint with the creator's color palette + a global style reference to make them look cohesive.

Everything is cached as markdown files (human-readable, git-diffable), uploaded to S3 via Bun's native S3 API, and served on the site: https://modeldrop.fyi

The whole thing runs on the Vercel AI SDK (@ai-sdk/fal for images, ai package for text generation) with Zod schemas for validation. All prompts, identity caches, and generation metadata are version-controlled.

Repo: https://github.com/okandship/MODELDROP (CC0, public domain)

What I think is interesting: the same pipeline produces wildly different results because each image model has its own "style fingerprint." FLUX portraits look different from Seedream portraits even with identical prompt structure. The restyle pass smooths this out but you can still feel the model's personality.

Would love feedback. What creators or models am I missing?
by maybelsyrup | 2026-02-11 16:15:15+00:00
Here’s how:

1. American men feel entitled to women, as from birth they’re told that they are.

2. Women know this, and (rightly!) hate it, and thus some of them pull away from relationships with men — or with entitled men. Unlike before, women can now survive (and even thrive) outside of a relationship with a man, especially an entitled one.

3. As a result, there are fewer babies.

OP’s point was that men ought to look at themselves in the mirror when they’re clutching their pearls about lower birth rates. I agreed, and proposed that the specific mechanism for men being shitty partners to have a kid with in so many cases is male entitlement: guys don’t believe they need to put in the work to be good partners and instead simply deserve a woman to bear their children. (Men are, by far, the more emotional / hysterical sex.)

It was a long post, but far from a tirade. That you describe it that way suggests something about it touched a nerve! Perhaps reread the parable?
by ndiddy | 2026-02-11 16:16:04+00:00
Looks like they shot the drone down with a laser:

> UPDATE (CNN): Source briefed by FAA tells me that military activity behind the El Paso flight ban included unmanned aircraft operations and laser countermeasure testing in airspace directly adjacent to civilian routes into El Paso International. Airspace restriction just lifted.

https://x.com/petemuntean/status/2021586247827828812
by woah | 2026-02-11 16:16:04+00:00
> It was at Netscape Communications where Gelobter first began working on the development of the GIF.

> Lisa Gelobter, a computer scientist who helped shape the modern web by leading the team that developed the animation technology used to create GIFs.

Looks like the GIF was invented by CompuServe in 1987?

> CompuServe introduced GIF on 15 June 1987 to provide a color image format for their file downloading areas. This replaced their earlier run-length encoding format, which was black and white only. GIF became popular because it used Lempel–Ziv–Welch data compression.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2026-02-11 16:16:13+00:00
> What is the most effective way to get rid of ants? To destroy their ability to use a pheromone trail. Perhaps we could just put advertising in it?

I'm taking this analogy for myself :)

> what kind of social system would afford long term substantial change?

In my experience over the last year, these things are true...

First, in-person interaction is strictly better than digital. You can meet lots of people digitally and talk to them in bed, but _interacting_ with a given person face-to-face means you can do any digital interaction, plus have very high-bandwidth communication, and also share papers. (I love paper. It's not obsolete if you know what a Pareto frontier is.) This is something that many people understand intuitively but it took me a while to quantify it.

Second, digital (text) communication affords bickering. In the best case, if I'm DMing a friend and we disagree about some political point, it will make the conversation awkward. If I'm in a big group chat, it can drag people into a dogpile. It's an emotional drain and nobody really likes it. And it doesn't happen nearly as much in person. Even with the exact same people. Even I am nicer and more patient in person. And being able to physically leave and see someone later is a nice option that digital spaces (even Signal) don't afford. They only understand permanent blocks and not just "Tell me your dumb take another time."

Third, you can just say "I'm trying to build community and make friends, can I introduce you to some people you might like?" and in the right context and framing, it can sort of work. I am still learning this skill.

Fourth, and I almost forgot - A _huge_ amount of nonverbal communication comes down to trust and respect, especially respecting other people's time. Did you call a 50-person meeting where 1 person is yammering about some bikeshed bullshit? Everyone hates that. Are you talking to someone one-on-one but they still won't give you a turn or ask you anything about yourself? They might be a good person but they're gonna be hard to get along with if they keep that up. Did you send someone a blog post that takes 5 minutes to read? And they didn't ask for it? They aren't gonna read it. I wouldn't read it. You would have more luck reading it out loud to them in person because it shows that you are both respecting each other's time. Otherwise you are assigning homework and asking their attention without paying your attention to them. I can't name a person who likes that.
by JPKab | 2026-02-11 16:16:14+00:00
Yeah, you have a hard life as you type on a device powered by magic with a full belly and a roof over your head in a building that magically heats and cools itself. Compared to our ancestors, who alternated between fighting to not die of hypothermia or starvation or have their infants eaten by predators, you really have it hard dude. That bald guy on the TV has a really big yacht and you don't, and that means your life is a tragedy. I'm really sorry for the suffering you're enduring because you don't get to party all day, every day. Participating in your own survival is truly an imposition that nobody should ever have to bear.
by Gravityloss | 2026-02-11 16:16:39+00:00
Thanks for the comments and suggestions everyone!

I'm foremost a guitar player which probably shows, so this was something I assumed could be a problem indeed. I'll have to think about it, but many of the suggestions sounds good. It's really easy to do feature development with the automatic deployment after pushing.

I also on purpose built this without checking what other pages are out there. I only checked afterwards, and it turned out at least sampling the search results a bit, every page seems to have somewhat different focus so I didn't end up creating exactly what already was done by very many others.
by mhitza | 2026-02-11 16:17:01+00:00
From the paper linked by jbotz

> The results for CSI can also be found in Figure 3. We find that we can identify individuals based on their normal walking style using CSI with high accuracy, here 82.4% ± 0.62.

If you're a person of interest you could be monitored, your walking pattern internalized in the model then followed through buildings. That's my intuition at practical applications, and the level of detail.
by mahrain | 2026-02-11 16:17:20+00:00
What happens is that a large body of water (pun intended) has the ability to absorb and reflect wifi signals as it moves through the room. For this you need to generate traffic and measure for instance RSSI or CSI (basically, signal strength) of the packets. If you increase frequency you can detect smaller movements such as arms moving vs. a body, or exclude pets if you reduce sensitivity. It works well for detecting presence and movement in a defined space, but ideally requires you to cross the path between two mains-powered devices, such as light bulbs or wifi mesh points. Passing a cafe doesn't seem too likely.

If you want to do advanced sensing, trying to identify a person, I would postulate you need to saturate a space with high frequency wifi traffic, ideally placed mesh points, and let the algo train on identifying people first by a certain signature (combination of size/weight, movement/gait, breath / chest movements).

Source: I worked on such technologies while at Signify (variants of this power Philips/Wiz "SpaceSense" feature).

More here: https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/16/23355255/signify-wiz-spac...
by ahf8Aithaex7Nai | 2026-02-11 16:17:36+00:00
The reason is simply that there are not enough incentives for manufacturers to do so. I would be happy if nothing on smartphones was glued together but everything was screwed or plugged in, and if I could simply replace batteries in smartphones and laptops, as was the case in the past. If these things are not made mandatory requirements, the thinner device, the lighter device, the device where the manufacturer can use battery life as the upper limit for device life will win.

I don't know anything about chips and boards, but in the EU, a regulation will come into force in 2027 that requires batteries in portable devices to be replaceable by the user without special tools.
Show HN: I built simple browser tools bcoz I'm tired of everything becoming SaaS
by sawarbandhe | 2026-02-11 16:17:37+00:00
Hi HN,

Over the last few years I’ve noticed something odd:

You now need an account to merge a PDF.
Or format JSON.
Or generate a QR code.

For utilities that can run entirely in the browser.

Many of these tools:

Upload files unnecessarily,
Inject heavy ads,
Track usage aggressively,
Gate basic functionality behind email walls.

As a developer, this started bothering me more than it should have.

So I built my own versions.

Bitlist is a collection of browser-based utilities where:

No signup is required,
No ads are shown,
No popups exist,
No tracking or monitoring scripts are included.

If something can run client-side, it runs locally

This isn’t a growth experiment or a funnel.
It’s just a clean toolbox for simple tasks.

Current tools include:

JSON formatter / validator,
PDF merge,
WebRTC leak test,
Internet speed test,
QR code generator,
Base64 / UUID / converters,
It will remain ad-free and tracking-free.

Would appreciate feedback on:

Performance,
Security concerns,
UX improvements,
Missing utilities.

https://bitlist.io
by semiquaver | 2026-02-11 16:18:15+00:00
I know that modern systems like aperture priority or full auto make things easier, but I maintain that the many photos I took with a fully manual film camera (Canon AE-1) were simply better than those taken with any subsequent DSLR. The simple act of calibrating the shutter speed, aperture size, and manual focus before and during shooting helps you slow down and think about composition and framing, making the end result more valuable. Same goes for the limited number of shots on a roll of film.

Nowadays it’s easier to just take lots of shots and fiddle with the setting and do bracketing and such. But I maintain something important was lost by the move to automatic cameras.
by collingreen | 2026-02-11 16:18:23+00:00
> FOMOing at the mouth

This is a great line - evocative, funny, and a bit o wordplay.

I think you might be right about the behavior here; I haven't been able to otherwise understand the absolute forcing through of "use AI!!" by people and upon people with only a hazy notion of why and how. I suppose it's some version of nuclear deterrence or Pascal's wager -- if AI isn't a magic bullet then no big loss but if it is they can't afford not to be the first one to fire it.
by mbrumlow | 2026-02-11 16:18:40+00:00
I think somebody is trying to push a narrative. A now deleted post was pointing to this

https://seattlemedium.com/lisa-gelobter-the-trailblazing-com...

And I can see how maybe the author of the post this entire thread is about could see this and just roll with it.

For the record the link I post seems to be entirely and completely wrong, and if I had such a post written so factually wrong about me, all while trying to take credit where none was owed, would be so embarrassing.

But we live in a strange new world where we can just fabricate anything we want and back fill websites and probably pollute AI with nonsense just to push political agenda and gain favor in the masses who ether are ignorant or don’t care to ever know the truth.
by sawarbandhe | 2026-02-11 16:18:40+00:00
A bit more technical context:

Tools like JSON formatting, validation, Base64, UUID generation, and most converters are processed entirely client-side using plain JavaScript.

There are intentionally no ad networks, no analytics scripts, and no tracking pixels. I wanted the site to load fast and do one thing well.

If anyone spots architectural issues, edge cases (especially large payload handling), or security concerns, I’d genuinely appreciate the critique.
by steveBK123 | 2026-02-11 16:18:49+00:00
I am at less than half jest here.

I have friends who are finance industry CTOs, and they have described it to me in realtime as CEO FOMO they need to manage ..

Remember tech is sort of an odd duck in how open people are about things and the amount of cross pollination. Many industries are far more secretive and so whatever people are hearing about competitors AI usage is 4th hand hearsay telephone game.

edit: noteworthy someone sent yet another firmwide email about AI today which was just linking to some twitter thread by a VC AI booster thinkbro
by ac29 | 2026-02-11 16:18:51+00:00
> a $500 Mac Mini has memory bandwidth that you just can’t get anywhere else for the price.

The cheapest new mac mini is $600 on Apple's US store.

And it has a 128-bit memory interface using LPDDR5X/7500, nothing exotic. The laptop I bought last year for <$500 has roughly the same memory speed and new machines are even faster.
by avidiax | 2026-02-11 16:18:53+00:00
I don't feel that this article is a fair summary of the paper. And the title is just clickbait.

The paper says, in a somewhat contrived scenario, with dozens of labelled walkthroughs per person, they can identify that person from their gait based on CSI and other WiFi information.

This is a long way from identifying one person in thousands or tens of thousands, being able to transfer identifying patterns among stations (the inference model is not usable with any other setup), etc.

All the talk of "images" and "perspectives" is journalistic fluffery. 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz wavelengths (12cm & 6cm) are too long to make anything a layperson call an "image" of a person.

What creepy thing could you actually do with this? Well, your neighbor could probably record this information and tell how many and which people are in your home, assuming that there is enough walking to do a gait analysis. They might be able to say with some certainty if someone new comes home.

That same neighbor could hide a camera and photograph your door, or sniff your WiFi and see what devices are active or run an IMSI catcher and surveil the entire neighborhood or join a corporate surveillance outfit like Ring. Using the CSI on your WiFi and a trained ML model is mostly cryptonerd imaginiation.
by wffurr | 2026-02-11 16:19:10+00:00
I have some 3PMS all season tires: Michelin Crossclimate 2. So far seem to be doing well on my FWD Chevy Bolt EV. I live in Boston though and we don't often get enough snow to really need snow tires. Also I usually ride my bike when it's snowy instead of driving.
by phatskat | 2026-02-11 16:19:29+00:00
Honestly if you made your system a plugin or mod for Cities, I’d consider reinstalling it. I got in early and realized that my patience for city building had waned since the days of SimCity 2000, and I’ve not seen roads in CS that ever looked appealing to me. Watching ridealong streams of sharp turns or cars moving in a way that would make my kidneys hug the sidewall of my abdomen really hurt the experience for me.

So if you’re ever feeling alone about noticing, you aren’t.
by plaidfuji | 2026-02-11 16:19:36+00:00
Fiverr CEO goes on a pretty dark rant about how people who don’t upskill and convert to AI workflows will have to change professions, etc.

Then concludes his email with:

> I have asked Shelly to free up time on my calendar next week so people can have conversations with me about our future.

I assume Shelly is an AI, and not human headcount the CEO is wasting on menial admin tasks??
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2026-02-11 16:20:19+00:00
> They would get crushed like a bug.

Much as I despise them, I'm not so sure that would be the case. I seem to remember folks saying the same about the Taliban, and the cartels have a lot more money and high-tech kit, than the Taliban.

Asymmetric warfare is a tough gig, on all sides.