MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by drdaeman | 2026-02-17 08:34:12+00:00
For establishing facts about person, the problem is, hostile governments are not unknown to revoke passports and cause all sorts of trouble. And if the government is benign that doesn’t mean it never turns hostile. We really don’t want to allow governments to disappear people, not physically, nor digitally.

I’m not a libertarian (was; realized why it doesn’t work in reality we have), but I still believe that no entity ever should be able to deny one’s identity, they can only refuse to attest it.

And the more serious problem is that nowadays we’re collectively so much into that flawed paradigm of “identity providers”[1] I’m afraid if a government-ran system happens it’ll would be still built in the same paradigm and engrave that into collective consciousness even further.

Private corporate-ran identities are IMHO better for the foreseeable interim, until we know for sure how to do things right. Because I suspect that whatever we pick as fundamental ideas is going to stick and bless or curse us for a long while. Nation states have longer lifespans than Internet companies popularity, so as weird as that may sound I’d prefer Gmail to, say, that Estonian X.509 scheme (no offense meant; and I’m only considering use outside of government services), despite latter being short-term better.

And - yes - I 100% agree that it’s past the time we should be using proper cryptography for attestation of all sorts, rather than sending passport photos and live selfies to increasingly more and more private companies. But that shouldn’t be general identity verification, it should be only for compliance, only when a law forces to obtain some information from some government-issued credentials. This part desperately needs moderation. But for the love of what’s still sane - unless we find ourselves with an unavoidable need and no other choice, let’s not use that for any other purposes, for now, please?

___

[1]: My view and understanding is that identity cannot be “provided” - those words simply don’t make sense together. Unless if we’re talking about impersonation and skip the “credentials” for brevity, and then it’s not our identity but someone else’s (even if created specially for us). Of course, I could be wrong.
by sixtyj | 2026-02-17 08:34:19+00:00
This applies when there is a large number of competitors.

Now companies are fighting for the attention of a finite number of customers, so they keep their prices in line with those around them.

I remember when Google started with PPC - because few companies were using it, it cost a fraction of recent prices.

And the other issue to solve is future lack of electricity for land data centers. If everyone wants to use LLM… but data centers capacity is finite due to available power -> token prices can go up. But IMHO devs will find an innovative approach for tokens, less energy demanding… so token prices will probably stay low.
by verdverm | 2026-02-17 08:34:45+00:00
Is this more than keeping history before compaction, making it all available via tools, and some backend bookkeeping for parallel tool calls? I'm not exactly sure what is interesting here

Much of this feels like a technical report of what they did, and makes me feel like we've reached the ICO whitepaper phase. I have very similar features in my custom coding agent, they seem pretty common sense to have. Are you really throwing away the compacted history? Saving it doesn't seem like a feature, the opposite seems like a gap. Same for making it available via toos/search, pretty standard stuff. Then too, ADK framework I use handles parallel agents/tools.
by lebuin | 2026-02-17 08:35:20+00:00
I think OP may be referring to the idea that the total number of calories burned in a day doesn't meaningfully change under a workout regime. Working out does burn calories, but after a few session your body starts to compensate by burning less calories in other areas (e.g. immune and reproductive system). The net result is close to zero, except in very demanding workout regimes.

I don't have the background to fully evaluate how true that is. I read "Burn" by Herman Pontzer, which at least makes a very good case for it.
by woahitsraj | 2026-02-17 08:36:54+00:00
This is such a shame. I was pissed enough when they killed the desktop app. Why not just make the iPad version available on Mac?

Continued enshittification at Meta. I don't care about privacy/encryption for my group chats and neither do a lot of people. Messenger was the last good, reliable, and fully cloud based messaging solution that most everyone was on.

Amazing that in 2026 there is not a single good messaging app. Whatsapp/Signal storing everything on device and going by phone number. is dumb and annoying. I've lost dozens of chats/photos/videos due to phone number changes, phone changes, ect. iMessage is terrible, full of spam and constant bugs/lack of feature parity on the Mac App, not to mention that half of my friends cant use it. All others have many of the same problems or just aren't used by that many people.
by thinkingemote | 2026-02-17 08:37:11+00:00
Possibly. As for this blog post and for most slop the prompt itself will contain the material. The material will be very short.

"Here is one paragraph of an idea, an abstract of an article. Write a blog post."

Whereas a "history of fire" contains no article in the prompt and so might have more material from its own auto complete database to draw from.
by xnorswap | 2026-02-17 08:37:21+00:00
What kind of sandwiches are you eating? 800 calories is a ridiculously large sandwich.

Even Tesco's bacon & egg triple is only 550 : https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/260422235

I'm struggling to find anything I'd describe as a sandwich come close to 800 calories.
by pcloadlett3r | 2026-02-17 08:38:04+00:00
You really couldn't tell? The overly dramatic transitions all over the place is such an obvious tell:

> Here's the part that surprised me:

Might as well have said "here's the kicker" and used emojis instead of bullets. Maybe you can share your reading sites as you seem rather undrrexposed to not recognize this immediately lol.

Edit: I mean come on man, how can you not tell?! I'm still cringing from this one:

> The incremental cost of actually thinking hard? Almost nothing.

Edit II

"This isn't one study"

Dum dum dum. Sooo dramatic. 100% slop.
Show HN: [Keyboard Navigator] Navigate any page without a mouse
by kkimdev | 2026-02-17 08:38:28+00:00
I've spent a lot of time trying to find a browser keyboard navigator that doesn't constantly fight with the website I'm actually on. Most extensions I've used end up hijacking native shortcuts on sites like Gmail or YT, which is pretty annoying.

So I built a Keyboard Navigator extension.

- Trigger: You just tap Left Shift to see the hints. It’s a quick toggle, so it doesn't interfere with your normal typing or site-specific hotkeys.
- New Tab: Tapping Right Shift opens the link in a background tab.
- Performance: I used an object pooling engine to keep it lag-free on huge pages. It also works with Shadow DOM and ARIA roles (where a lot of simpler navigators tend to break).
- Minimalist: No background processes, no configuration, and no extra features that add bloat.

This is mainly a personal productivity project for myself, so no ads, free, and will be open source forever — I just wanted to share it as it has been working great for me.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/keyboard-navigator/...

https://github.com/kkimdev/monorepo-public/tree/main/keyboar...
by evnix | 2026-02-17 08:39:12+00:00
This is similar to how I solved a BYOK(bring your own key) feature at work. We had a lot of hardcoded endpoints and structures on the client and code that was too difficult to move over a nice BYOK structure within the given timeframe. So we ended up making a proxy that basically injected customer keys as they passed through our servers. note that there are a lot security implications doing this.
by zephen | 2026-02-17 08:39:28+00:00
> Wow, that's a very torturous reading of a specific line in a standard.

It's actually a much more torturous reading to say "if any line in the program contains undefined behavior (such as the example given in the standard, integer overflow), then it's OK for the compiler to treat the entire program as garbage and create any behavior whatsoever in the executable."

Which is exactly what had been claimed, that he was addressing.
by jeanro_hunter | 2026-02-17 08:39:39+00:00
We built a free logo API for developers and products that need company logos on the fly.

Features

GET https://logos.hunter.io/{domain} → returns logo image

No auth, no API key

Works anywhere you can reference a URL

Why now?
The legacy Clearbit Logo API stoped working last year, so we made a drop-in alternative developers can use without signup.
by u1hcw9nx | 2026-02-17 08:39:51+00:00
>We examine the extent to which security against a fully malicious server holds true for three leading vendors who make the Zero Knowledge Encryption claim: Bitwarden, LastPass and Dashlane. Collectively, they have more than 60 million users and 23% market share. We present 12 distinct attacks against Bitwarden, 7 against LastPass and 6 against Dashlane. The attacks range in severity, from integrity violations of targeted user vaults to the complete compromise of all the vaults associated with an organisation. The majority of the attacks allow recovery of passwords. We have disclosed our findings to the vendors and remediation is underway.
by canucker2016 | 2026-02-17 08:40:17+00:00
Most creatine studies focus on the effects of creatine on physical activity, especially wrt resistance training.

Rhonda Patrick has made several YouTube videos about creatine and you can find more information about creatine at her website - https://www.foundmyfitness.com/topics/creatine.

One of her creatine videos mentions that your muscles will take up ingested creatine faster than the brain. So for any creatine to make its way to the brain, your muscular creatine stores must be topped up first.

I think dosage would depend on the amount of daily physical activity. If you work out a lot, you'd have to replenish your muscular creatine stores before the brain could access any/much.

She also mentions boosting creatine dosage after bouts of mental exertion.
by hnbad | 2026-02-17 08:40:29+00:00
> The current trend in all major providers seem to be: get you to spin up as many agents as possible so that you can get billed more and their number of requests goes up.

I was surprised when I saw that Cursor added a feature to set the number of agents for a given prompt. I figured it might be a performance thing - fan out complex tasks across multiple agents that can work on the problem in parallel and get a combined solution. I was extremely disappointed when I realized it's just "repeat the same prompt to N separate agents, let each one take a shot and then pick a winner". Especially when some tasks can run for several minutes, rapidly burning through millions of tokens per agent.

At that point it's just rolling dice. If an agent goes so far off-script that its result is trash, I would expect that to mean I need to rework the instructions and context I gave it, not that I should try the same thing again and hope that entropy fixes it. But editing your prompt offline doesn't burn tokens, so it's not what makes them money.
by ACCount37 | 2026-02-17 08:40:37+00:00
It's almost entirely in your brain. Less "your muscles remember how to do things" and more "your brain remembers how to do things using your muscles".

The muscles and the nerves within your limbs adapt some - they respond to being used - but they don't have the representation capacity to store action patterns in them.

The spine itself is another matter - it's much more complex and adaptive, it has some capacity, it can learn things. It mostly carries a set of reflexes you get at birth, and some commonly used learned action patterns. Less "how to play the piano" and more "a set of finger motions useful for playing piano". The most studied thing is probably the spinal involvement in gait generation and stabilization of bipedal locomotion.

Now, things would be different if you were an octopus. But humans are pretty centralized, as far as nervous system goes.
by ghrl | 2026-02-17 08:41:09+00:00
Yeah, that model is amazing. It even runs reasonably well on my mid-range Android phone with this quite simple but very useful application, as long as you don't speak for too long or interrupt yourself for transcribing every once in a while. I do have handy.computer on my Mac too.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46640855

I find the model works surprisingly well and in my opinion surpasses all other models I've tried. Finally a model that can mostly understand my not-so-perfect English and handle language switching mid sentence (compare that to Gemini's voice input, which is literally THE WORST, always trying to transcribe in the wrong language and even if the language is correct produces the uttermost crap imaginable).
by MITSardine | 2026-02-17 08:42:31+00:00
I find it surprising. The piece of code I'm working on is about 10k LoC to define the basic structures and functionality and I found Claude Code would systematically spend significant time and tokens exploring it to add even basic functionality. Part of the issue is this deals with a problem domain LLMs don't seem to be very well trained on, so they have to take it all in, they don't seem to know what to look for in advance.

I went through a couple of iterations of the CLAUDE.md file, first describing the problem domain and library intent (that helped target search better as it had keywords to go by; note a domain-trained human would know these in advance from the three words that comprise the library folder name) and finally adding a concise per-function doc of all the most frequently used bits. I find I can launch CC on a simple task now, without it spending minutes reading the codebase before getting started.
by nunobrito | 2026-02-17 08:42:48+00:00
If possible, I'd ask for a shorter tag name to keep it more readable. For example: "gwtar-screenshot" and "gwtar-description" would work. I've just asked to make it official because otherwise is difficult to get different parsers to agree in the future.

> An iframe wrapper?

The way Archive.org does this navigation between multiple versions is quite pleasant to use. Don't know for sure but might be an iframe added on top.
by jasonvorhe | 2026-02-17 08:43:01+00:00
If Matrix has shown anything, it's that not everyone should design protocols:

https://hanez.org/document/why-matrix-sucks/

https://forum.hackliberty.org/t/why-we-abandoned-matrix-the-...

https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/giving-up-on-element-and-matrixorg...
by tibbar | 2026-02-17 08:43:27+00:00
For a typical coding agent, there are intermediate tool call outputs and LLM commentary produced while it works on a task and passed to the LLM as context for follow up requests. (Hence the term agent: it is an LLM call in a loop.) You can easily see this with e.g. Claude Code, as it keeps track of how much space is left in the context and requires "context compaction" after the context gradually fills up over the course of a session.

In this regard, the reasoning trace of an agent is trivially accessible to clients, unlike the reasoning trace of an individual LLM API call; it's a higher level of abstraction. Indeed, I implemented an agent just the other day which took advantage of this. The OP that you originally replied to was discussing an agentic coding process, not an individual LLM API call.
by ileonichwiesz | 2026-02-17 08:44:41+00:00
I’m not denying this has been the case for some people. I myself have switched to pretty much exclusively wearing trousers from my favourite tiny brand that cuts and sews them <100km from where I live, and I’m privileged enough to always try to choose quality over price. But quality products have been getting much harder to find in the past years, and I was under the impression we're mostly outliers.

Looking at my family and friend group’s spending habits, it feels like everything is purchased either from Temu or from one of those super-low-price-super-low-quality stores that have been taking Europe by storm these past couple years (i.e. Action, Tedi, Pepco). It’s kinda maddening.
by deaux | 2026-02-17 08:45:10+00:00
Agree that progressive disclosure is fantastic, but

> (e.g. for DB schema related topics, see such and such a file).

Rather than doing this, put another AGENTS.md file in a DB-related subfolder. It will be automatically pulled into context when the agent reads any files in the file. This is supported out of the box by any agent worth its salt, including OpenCode and CC.

IMO static instructions referring an LLM to other files are an anti-pattern, at least with current models. This is a flaw of the skills spec, which refers to creating a "references" folder and such. I think initial skills demos from Anthropic also showed this. This doesn't work.
by fuzzfactor | 2026-02-17 08:45:15+00:00
>Cheap globally accessible labor has not just recently become available. Anti-trust was pretty weak for a long time. Healthcare system is terribly expensive and corrupt and arguably Obamacare made it worse.

It's good that you pointed out some of the examples that may not be wholly responsible, but have surely compounded over quite some time and may very well be worse on the ground than the most realistic statistics could ever measure very meaningfully.

I wouldn't say the bullet points are hit or miss, more like some home-runs and some bunts.

Good chart from the FED, but experience has shown that 2010 to 2012 was a noth.ing.burger compared to 1976 nor 1983. You ain't seen no "real" recession yet.

And that's the most highly referenced statistic we have so it shows how widely skewed and unrealistic it can be to take things like this at face value when it comes to comparing data over time.

Remember currency had huge changes in real value at different points while its face value stayed the same, and the purpose of these charts was to not let that seem like the dominating factor.

Same as the purpose of inventing GDP in such a way there could never be valid comparison to traditional GNP.

Edit: not my downvote, corrective upvote actually, that's the most accurate data there is so it's still better to have than nothing, and to gather what it means when you understand its undercurrents for over 50 full years first hand
by palata | 2026-02-17 08:46:00+00:00
> open source projects are not just code but also communities

No. Open source projects are open source projects. Open sourcing my code does not mean at all that I have to build a community.

> The obligation is

There is no obligation. Again I don't say that authors should be jerks (obviously they shouldn't), but what seems very unclear to too many people is that users are not entitled to anything at all.

Because you choose to depend on something that someone provided for free does not mean they now owe you anything. Just like if I donate 20 dollars to a charity, it doesn't mean that I must now volunteer for that charity.
by bonesss | 2026-02-17 08:46:03+00:00
I also have felt like these kinds of efforts at instructions and agent files have been worthwhile, but I am increasingly of the opinion that such feelings represent self-delusion from seeing and expecting certain things aided by a tool that always agrees with my, or its, take on utility. The agent.md file looks like it’d work, it looks how you’d expect, but then it fails over and over. And the process of tweaking is pleasant chatting with supportive supposed insights and solutions, which means hours of fiddling with meta-documentation without clear rewards because of partial adherence.

The papers conclusions align with my personal experiments at managing a small knowledge base with LLM rules. The application of rules was inconsistent, the execution of them fickle, and fundamental changes in processing would happen from week-to-week as the model usage was tweaked. But, rule tweaking always felt good. The LLM said it would work better, and the LLM said it had read and understood the instructions and the LLM said it would apply them… I felt like I understoood how best to deliver data to the LLMs, only to see recurrent failures.

LLMs lie. They have no idea, no data, and no insights into specific areas, but they’ll make pleasant reality-adjacent fiction. Since chatting is seductive, and our time sense is impacted by talking, I think the normal time versus productivity sense is further pulled out of ehack. Devs are notoriously bad at estimating where they’re using time, long feedback loops filled with phone time and slow ass conversation don’t help.
by christoph | 2026-02-17 08:46:08+00:00
It’s absolutely propaganda and a perfect example of how the public gets manipulated on a daily basis. Let’s break down the facts:

- Pushes for facial recognition

- Pushes for more state run surveillance

- Pushes for AI based surveillance

- Pushes for greater data collection, access & mining

- Legitimises it all under the classic “save the kids” meme and pushes emotionally hard for more.

The main issues i’ve seen discussed on HN the last couple of months have been critical of the never ending and increasing government surveillance. Both sides of the pond. This is their answer.

Simultaneously we’re hearing about how almost anybody and everybody beyond a level of power was well aware of industial level sex trafficking and abuse, and either totally turned a blind eye or joined in.

The article might carry some weight if it wasn’t from an authoritarian state backed organisation that’s very well known for covering up for, and protecting multiple famous high level sexual criminals within it’s own organisation, spanning multiple decades, that has never faced any real audit, investigation or justice for its own crimes.
by jiggawatts | 2026-02-17 08:46:12+00:00
I’ve seen an fascinating paper (sorry, lost the url) that expanded on this using game theory: it’s common for “economic stratification” to have on the order of ten to fifteen levels, from abject poverty up to hundred-billionaires.

Look at it this way: there are five orders of magnitude between a “mere” ten-millionaire and the likes of Elon or Bezos!

To most people that’s the “same” level of rich, but each factor of ten is dramatically richer!

However, signals like “purposefully disheveled” and “well manicured” are essentially binary, so… they’re alternated. Each strata layer of factor of ten indicates this by flipping whatever the layer is doing below them. They won’t be confused with “two layers down” because that’s such a gulf that nobody will misunderstand.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-17 08:48:25+00:00
> I get what you're trying to say, though. The less world knowledge you provide the LLM, which it otherwise lacks, the worse its outputs will be

... No, wasn't trying to say that at all, I'm saying that it seems like the tokens a LLM produce works much worse as inputs than the tokens a human would produce, regardless of what it actually seems to say.
by reasonableklout | 2026-02-17 08:48:47+00:00
Cursor and others have a subagent feature, which sounds like what you wanted. However, there has to be some decision making around how to divide up a prompt into tasks. This is decided by the (parent) model currently.

The best-of-N feature is a bit like rolling N dice instead of one. But it can be quite useful if you use different models with different strengths and weaknesses (e.g. Claude/GPT-5/Gemini), rather than assigning all to N instances of Claude, for example. I like to use this feature in ask mode when diving into a codebase, to get an explanation a few different ways.