MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by talismanick | 2026-02-23 23:47:33+00:00
The semantics don't map onto modern languages: it's verbose assembly, with business logic consisting of GOTOs between segments of million line codebases with debug-evolved behavior encompassing a spec (e.g. translate between ancient ad hoc database formats) and then some. Porting COBOL means replicating all that existing customers expect and depend on, including what's unspecified.
I couldn't tell you how hard it is in practice to work past global state heisenbugs - never written it myself, only studied it out of fascination - but it's an entertaining trainwreck whenever a bank announces a COBOL->Java migration, spends millions, fails, and goes back to COBOL, so it's not even clearly possible in general.
by joelres | 2026-02-23 23:47:40+00:00
So. True. This use case was fun, but was the first thing I've done that wasn't easily sandboxed.

One key is sandboxing the agent (easy to do with Claude Code) so that it can only see a certain directory and needs to ask permission for additional directory access (works well). Can double layer sandbox if you don't trust the Claude cli.

The ISO issue is whole other ballgame. In this case, for me, it was a bit of a yolo. I did click through the internet archive link and it seemed decent, but definitely risk here. Watching output doesn't really matter if there is a virus in the random executable that it pulled
by maxglute | 2026-02-23 23:48:11+00:00
So the answer is really no considering vast majorities of SMEs i.e. 99%+ of EU business operates at "ludicrously small" scale that can't fill a container, i.e. about half of EU internal trade. 80% discount off what base price, because if after 80% discount off high priced EU courier rates and final cost more than one euro, PRC still comes out ahead, i.e. PRC domestic first mile prices are like 20-80 cents per parcel. Unless private EU courier rates are 1-5 euros (they're probably not), they still lose to PRC first-mile. (TBF I'm just assuming EU courier prices, my knowledge more limited to PRC logistics). If that's the case, EU simply can't compete, as in EU systemically not capable of matching PRC price floor. Hence IIRC why EU plan to add flat custom duty per item on Chinese parcels to make them more expensive. Like I'm sure many established businesses factor/absorb higher shipping cost into opex, shipping cost/friction affects things like startup formation in first place etc.
by imiric | 2026-02-23 23:49:01+00:00
I'm not sure how I feel about SKG. On one hand: sure, a product you buy should be expected to work for more than a couple of years. This gets fuzzy with modern service subscription models, licensing terms, etc., but in general, planned obsolescence shouldn't exist in digital products any more than in physical ones.

On the other, though, the companies that produce games that stop working are not worth supporting. Their games are often not great to begin with, and rewarding this behavior simply gives them a reason to keep abusing consumers.

There are so many studios that produce games worth playing, and make them accessible without DRM on platforms like GOG and itch.io. A one-time payment can get you many hours of enjoyment for as long as you have a compatible system to run it on. This is getting more difficult on Windows, but thankfully Linux is a solid gaming platform now, and there are many well supported virtualization options for older games.

So my point is: stop supporting scummy companies, and start supporting passionate game developers. There is a practically infinite catalog of great experiences beyond the yearly rehashed EA, Activision, or Ubisoft title.
by itishappy | 2026-02-23 23:49:04+00:00
I support what you're doing, but I'd like to point out that everybody cares about ethics at the start...

> We are committed to protecting human privacy and mitigating bias in policing with the development of best-in-class technology rooted in ethical design, which unites civilians and public servants in pursuit of a safer, more equitable society.

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety
by m4rtink | 2026-02-23 23:49:21+00:00
>The democratization ends at your router. Unless you are willing to lay down your own wires - which for legal reasons you most likely won't be able to do, we will hopelessly be dependent on the ISP. (Radio on free frequencies is possible and there are valiant attempts, they will ultimately remain niche and have severe bandwidth limitations)

I don't know - the rate of adoption of MeshCore and similar technologies is quite astonishing.
by servo_sausage | 2026-02-23 23:49:35+00:00
Urban operating domain combined with legacy approaches.

If I was designing a robotaxi 10 years ago I would use lidar, designing consumer vehicles for near future L3 it's no longer the best use of resources. I prefer more compute and cameras for the money.

Our current issues are now scene understanding and navigation; followed by parking. We get very little value from LIDAR in the driving cases, so much so that we don't even use it for active nav even on cars that have it. Only for training and parking.
by josephg | 2026-02-23 23:49:49+00:00
> looks to me like a full implementation of the RFC in rust

Only the client parts. And only the client parts its actually using. JMAP is designed to make clients much simpler than servers. A JMAP server needs to actually parse message envelopes - which is way more difficult to do correctly than people think. A JMAP client can just ask the server for pre-parsed messages.

The code is here:

https://github.com/josephg/claude-mail

Claude put its JMAP API wrapper in a child crate (confusingly also called jmap-client).
by FreakLegion | 2026-02-23 23:49:55+00:00
This particular gift is also problematic because Horowitz is an investor in Flock, and Horowitz's family foundation is spending money on Flock that will in turn increase its value, which benefits him as an investor. Of course lawyers will have looked at all this to make sure it doesn't run afoul of self-dealing rules, but that just means the rules verge on uselessly weak.
by sillyfluke | 2026-02-23 23:50:01+00:00
Bottom line, no one's buying your vibeslop when they can create and maintain their own for their custom needs. And if we're not buying each others vibeslop there's no productivity to be measured in the economy.

With all this recent Claw stuff, it's weird that as people who should be championing the opposite due to our field of study or industry, some of us are now pushing a method of automation that is akin to robo vaccums randomly tracking dogshit across the carpet.

In my working environment, people get dressed down for repeatedly communicating incorrect information. If they do it repeatedly in an automated fashion they will be publically shamed if they are senior enough.

I have no idea what benefit a human-in-loop for sending an automatically generated emails or agent generated sdks or buliding blocks has when there is no guarentee or even a probability of correctness attached to the result. The effort for vaildating and editing a generated email can be equally or greater than manually writing a regular email let alone one of certain complexity or significance.

And what do we do to create to try to guarentee a semblance of correctness? We add another layer of automated validation performed by, you guessed it, the same crew of wacky fuzzy operators that can inject correct sounding gibberish or business workflows at any moment.

It's almost like trying to build a house of cards faster than the speed with which it is collapsing. There seems to be a morbid fascination among even the best of us with how far things can be taken until this way forward leads to some indisputable catastrophe.
by thesafeclaw | 2026-02-23 23:50:11+00:00
Safeclaw introduces our first safe gen AI feature: blogging. The worst thing that an Ai can do when blogging is to write a bad blog post. We have most of openclaws features using deterministic non generative AI. We have two options for blogging non generative AI and generative AI. We are working on incorporating more features in other claws while ensuring that how they are implemented are safe by design.

I love stars, I'd love a sponsor even more.
by janalsncm | 2026-02-23 23:50:23+00:00
It’s not that capabilities could not exist without the original work. It’s more that the shortest path between A and B isn’t repeating all of the same work.

Further, although media likes to depict Chinese labs as “just copying” I think there’s a ton of hubris involved. First of all, American labs are filled with Chinese who are trained at the very same schools as Chinese labs. Second, if you look at the contributions from Chinese labs many have pushed the state of the art.

Zooming out, data is kind of an arbitrary line to draw. Anthropic didn’t invent the neural network, back propagation, or the transformer. They didn’t invent all of the post training techniques they are using. They might even be using some pretrained open models during pre training and data prep. They got all of those for free because those things are shared openly.
by TuringNYC | 2026-02-23 23:50:28+00:00
>> I would have believed that before 2020, but after COVID, I fully believe that if the food ran out, half the country would say it's a fake hoax. People would be on their death beds actually starving, and deny it was happening with their last breath.

We're in a K-Shaped Economy right now and half the folks will deny there is any K and insist everything is amazing.
by ASalazarMX | 2026-02-23 23:50:48+00:00
In my experience, learning COBOL takes you a week at most, learning the "COBOLIC" (ha ha) way of your particular source base will take you a couple of months, but mastering it all including architecture will take you a year, half a year if you're really good.

One year from zero to senior doesn't sound that hard, does it? Try that with a Java codebase.
by microflash | 2026-02-23 23:50:52+00:00
I’d recommend Pixel but they have terrible battery life and they heat up pretty easily. On the other hand, they have support for Graphene OS, long software support and very nice cameras. Samsung and Xiaomi are absolutely worst choices when it comes to software; they are filled to brim with bloatware and worse, blatant spyware. The only way to use them is to immediately install a clean alternative OS, such as LineageOS.
by everfrustrated | 2026-02-23 23:51:00+00:00
The Guardian article linked has chosen to omit material facts regarding Karen... This is par for the course when it comes to Guardian reporting and doubly so for immigration related articles. The Guardian only prints hit pieces nowadays that reinforce their group-think propaganda.

https://x.com/DHSgov/status/2025975226002018309

>What the media won’t tell you: this woman was BANNED from our country for 10 years for violating terms of her visa.

Here are the facts:

Karen Newton has violated the laws of our nation, and overstayed her visa waiver admission for almost FOUR years after visiting her spouse. Her husband, William Newton ALSO broke the law for nearly 20 years by overstaying an H-1B visa.

The Biden Administration granted her a tourist visa, and she traveled to the U.S. under this visa and was let into our nation.

When she and her husband attempted to cross the Canadian border, they did not have proper paperwork for their vehicle and were denied entry into Canada. During her inspection re-entering the U.S., she was unable to provide clear details about her situation, including her husband’s legal status.

Given her history of overstays, her husband’s unlawful presence, and the vehicle documentation issues, officers determined scrutiny and detention were warranted under the law and she was detained.
by animesh93 | 2026-02-23 23:51:16+00:00
Author here. I kept running into the same problem while working on big projects: threat models drift away from the codebase as soon as architecture changes, so we started experimenting with keeping security intent directly in the code.

GuardLink parses structured annotations from comments (@asset, @threat, @mitigates, @exposes) and continuously builds a threat model from them — dashboards, reports, SARIF output — and a diff engine that checks how the security posture changes between commits.

The CI step is intentionally simple: removing a mitigation or escalating an exposure can fail the build, but documenting a new exposure is treated as a warning rather than a blocker. The goal is to make threat modeling evolve with the code instead of being a separate process.

AI coding agents can generate annotations alongside implementation, and GuardLink validates them so the threat model stays current because it never leaves the repo.

In one internal test on a deliberately vulnerable Node.js app, three different agents produced 143 annotations covering ~73% of known issues. About 6 minutes and ~$0.50 in API cost.

Spec is CC-BY-4.0, CLI is MIT. Happy to answer questions.
by techblueberry | 2026-02-23 23:51:37+00:00
You don't have to, but hilariously - I would never work for the CIA or FBA (I mean I can't, I think they require a college degree) but the most paranoid conspiracy-theorist libertarian hacker I ever knew did, and said it was the best work of his life. Ironic?

I'm going to move off-grid and become a sovereign citizen.
by XorNot | 2026-02-23 23:51:57+00:00
This is a fairly weak argument though: the layperson also cannot verify the software updates we push to their phone/computer or any number of other critical devices in the chain.

All of this is reputation management: if technical experts broadly agree the system does what it says, then all of us have to accept that in aggregate that's probably good enough and significantly better then many other areas.
by everforward | 2026-02-23 23:51:57+00:00
That would be an incredibly risky escalation, and it would be a stupid ultimatum to issue.

The people, or even states, could escalate in response. The worst case is escalating to violence; ICE isn’t trained, equipped, or numerous to deal with deploying into a violently hostile area. The army could, but then we’re in full blown civil war.

A more realistic middle ground is that it pushes people or states into nonviolent non-compliance by eg refusing to pay federal taxes. Frankly if California and New York alone stopped paying federal taxes the system would probably crumble.
by jomohke | 2026-02-23 23:52:09+00:00
You're validly critiquing where it is now.

The hype people are excited because they're guessing where it's going.

This is notable because it's a milestone that was not previously possible: a driver that works, from someone with ~zero effort learning the hardware or driver programming themselves.

It's not production ready, but neither is the first working version of anything. Do you see any reason progress will stop abruptly here?
by stockresearcher | 2026-02-23 23:52:23+00:00
Nothing is so difficult about COBOL. It’s just old-fashioned and everything surrounding it is legacy. Most people seem to think it has a negative value when placed on a resume. Maybe that’s true, I don’t know.

I have trouble getting people to even look at C code these days. I don’t understand why devs are so afraid of old things.
by mappu | 2026-02-23 23:52:32+00:00
A few release cycles back, Swiss Maps became popular (i think, particular thanks to CockroachDB) as a replacement for standard Go map[K]V.

Later, Go's stdlib map implementation was updated to use Swiss Maps internally and everyone benefited.

Do you think the xsync.Map could be considered for upstreaming? Especially if it outperforms sync.Map at all the same use cases.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-02-23 23:52:54+00:00
Damn but I guess I can still understand it but can there be a blanket ban of Chinese model themselves period or the idea being that you can't use Chinese models for american citizens or similar under the US constitution.

This is a big deal of itself and thanks for sharing but I feel like that the above idea of blanket banning chinese models is defintiely something that American AI companies want and with their lobbying efforts and many other things, I think that its up to genuine debate if this would be reality or not.
by OkayPhysicist | 2026-02-23 23:53:11+00:00
The short answer is someone cared enough about the specific example in gaming to actually go through all the work to demand change.

The longer answer is that games are one of the only pieces of software your average consumer actually buys these days, and they have a few particularly egregious examples that make it much easier to argue in front of a bunch of politicians without a firm grasp on the digital world, like "Game is completely client side except it checks with a server every 5 minutes to make sure you have a valid license, so when the company goes belly up you're left with a brick"
by runarberg | 2026-02-23 23:54:07+00:00
I don‘t think it really matters how much people supported these extreme actions. This policy was clearly wrong. The general public mounted a much more significant opposition against this policy then the Democratic party did. Some members of the Democratic party did some opposition, but the party as a whole clearly did not oppose this, and therefor it was never truly on the ballots.

To be clear, I personally don‘t think stuff like this should ever be on the ballot in any democracy. Human rights are not up for election, they should simply be granted, and any policy which seeks to deny people human rights should be rejected by any of the country’s democratic institutions (such as courts, labor unions, the press, etc.)
by vjanma | 2026-02-23 23:54:13+00:00
Great writeup. This focuses heavily on the fragrance/perception side of digital olfaction, but there's a whole other dimension here: detection. Think of it as speaker vs microphone — most of the hype (Osmo, Givaudan) is on generating and designing scents, but detecting and identifying chemical signatures in real-world environments is an equally hard problem.

The article nails the core challenge: the structure-odor relationship is messy and there's no "RGB of smell." We're hitting the same wall from the detection side. Getting to parts-per-trillion sensitivity is one thing; making sense of complex, noisy molecular signatures in the wild is another. The DREAM challenge benchmarks are encouraging, but the gap between lab conditions and real-world deployment is enormous.

Curious if anyone else is working on the detection and safety rather than fragrance. Feels underrepresented relative to the urgency.

Disclosure: I work in the scent detection space.
by jajuuka | 2026-02-23 23:54:27+00:00
Seems like you're overestimating how many people are addicted to gambling. Much in the same way those who are anti-alcohol will conflate responsible drinking with alcoholism. Gambling can be just as terrible, but it is different than heroin and alcoholism since it does not have a chemically addictive component. Reducing all addictions to being the same thing is damaging to addicts and addiction recovery. Much the same way reducing all crime to the same thing is for inmates of the prison system. You're removing nuance and difference which helps promote understanding.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-23 23:55:07+00:00
Takeaways:

* Private equity returned fewer profits to investors for a fourth straight year as the industry sat on $3.8 trillion of unsold assets and struggled to raise money for new funds.

* Distributions as a percentage of net asset value remained at 14% last year — the second-lowest level since the depths of the 2008 financial crisis.

* Fundraising tumbled 16% in 2025 to $395
billion - the fourth straight year of declines - even as investors devoted more capital to vehicles focused on infrastructure and secondaries.
by Daneel_ | 2026-02-23 23:55:12+00:00
I was in the small phone camp. I’m in a fortunate position where due to my work I have a work phone that has regularly refreshed hardware that I have some input on, so I made the conscious decision to switch to a max-sized handset (iPhone 15 pro max). I gave up being able to ‘one-hand’ the phone, but let’s be honest - all modern mainstream phones can’t really be used with one hand easily, that ship has sailed.

I really liked it. The larger screen is more productive, and the improved cameras on the larger phones are worth it for me. I take more and better photos of my kids.

Sometimes it’s worth trying the thing you don’t think you want - you might be surprised.
by ndriscoll | 2026-02-23 23:55:25+00:00
If I search "HDCP remover" on Amazon I see tons of results for $15-$30, yeah. Reviews say they work as advertised. That typically exists in a different space from DVRs since it's not relevant for broadcast TV as far as I know (AFAIK there's nothing for DVRs to remove in the first place), but it'd be easy enough to chain it if you needed to.
by abustamam | 2026-02-23 23:55:33+00:00
If I went to the store and asked for a pack of cigarettes, I show my ID (well, I would if I was carded, but I'm no longer carded :)) and the clerk looks at it, maybe scans it, then takes my money.

If I try to go to an adult website, or even just a discord server with adult content, I need to upload my ID. And now there's numerous third parties who now are looking at my ID, and I have no idea if I can trust them with my info. Indeed, I probably can't, given how many of them have already been breached.

Of all the people, PornHub actually has a pretty good write-up on this (1) (2), and they refer to "device-based" age verification, where you verify your identity once to say, Google or whoever. Then your device proves your age. Fewer middlemen. One source of truth.

I am not against age verification.
I am against the surveillance state.

(1) https://www.pornhub.com/blog/age-verification-in-the-news

(2) https://www.xbiz.com/news/281228/opinion-why-device-based-ag...
by array_key_first | 2026-02-23 23:55:37+00:00
They're only popular because people are routinely lied to. We see this same issue time and time again in "free markets".

If you tell people this will help stop crime and that's it, everyone and their mama is gonna say yes.

If you tell people the truth, that police don't really care to look at the data and this surveillance is going to be used to target innocent people for unrelated "crimes" on the taxpayers dollar, then everyone would say no.

This is also why 99% of surveys are broken. You can get people to agree to literally anything if you just lie a little. After all, Adolf Hitler got elected by promising to fix the German economy and, in a way, he did.
by thephyber | 2026-02-23 23:55:58+00:00
The omnibus bills aren’t blackmail, as much as a symptom of the failure of Congress to be able to do what it is supposed to: debate.

There is 1 funding bill per year which only requires a 50% vote instead of a 60% / 67% to pass that all other spending bills require.

Every member with a goal tries to attach it to the big annual funding bill. The bill becomes so large that nobody likes the bill as a whole, but everybody has something in it they will defend.

And the old filtering process (committees which recommend the content of bills) are dominated by majority party leadership. This is maybe the closest symptom to blackmail.
by blakec | 2026-02-23 23:56:06+00:00
Yeah, but not a framework. I'm using Claude Code's hook system. 84 hooks across 15 event types.

Biggest thing I learned: don't let multiple hooks fire independently on the same event. I had seven on UserPromptSubmit, each reading stdin on their own. Two wrote to the same JSON state file. Concurrent writes = truncated JSON = every downstream hook breaks. One dispatcher per event running them sequentially from cached stdin fixed it. 200ms overhead per prompt, which you never notice.

The "multi-agent is worse than serial" take is true when agents share context. Stops being true when you give planning agents their own session (broad context, lots of file reads) and implementation agents their own (narrow task, full window). I didn't plan that separation. It just turned out that mixing both in one session made both worse.

No framework, no runtime. Just files. You can use one hook or eighty-four.