MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Shoulditrustit.com – a simple, early alternative to Trustpilot
by franbetteo | 2026-02-02 14:02:50+00:00
I built a very early MVP of an alternative to Trustpilot over the weekend.

The motivation: review platforms increasingly feel adversarial to both users and companies, with opaque moderation and pay-to-play dynamics. I wanted to explore a simpler, more transparent starting point.

What it does today:

Anyone can leave reviews

Companies can claim their profile

No complicated verification yet, intentionally kept simple

Why participate early:

Early companies get a free account forever (grandfathered)

Claimed profiles get a backlink (currently low value, but potentially useful if this grows)

The whole project only works if the review dataset exists

What I’m asking:

Leave reviews (for listed or unlisted companies)

Claim your company if relevant

If you want to help more, a backlink helps early traction

Monetization (only if it works):

Very cheap base plan for companies (<$20/month)

Premium features later if there’s real demand

Early users keep free access

Planned next steps:

Company responses to reviews

Invite links

Better company customization (logos, etc.)

Google / OAuth login

This is intentionally rough and early. I’m mostly looking for feedback on:

incentives

trust mechanics

what should not exist in a review platform

Happy to hear thoughts.
by jordanb | 2026-02-02 14:03:20+00:00
Back when Wikipedia was new people had a tendency to spend all day in it clicking deeper and deeper. It was called "ratholing."

It was timewasting or avoidant behavior for sure, and often described negatively. But at least you were learning something.

Silicon Valley then spent the next few decades trying to understand that behavior so they could isolate it, strip all positive value out of it, and make it highly profitable.
by rvnx | 2026-02-02 14:03:42+00:00
It's also illegal in many jurisdictions (e.g. in the US, viewed as a scheme to defraud advertisers by generating invalid clicks that cause financial harm, by depleting their budgets and push them to spend for fake traffic), but in practice it's way easier to just blacklist that IP / user.

The big networks filter such traffic, the small networks benefit from it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/legal/comments/1pq6kgp/is_it_legal_...

You may also get accidentally get your own website blacklisted or moved to a lower RPM tier, or provoke shadow-ban websites that you like to visit, or... generate more ad revenue for them.
by eaurouge | 2026-02-02 14:03:54+00:00
The point I was trying to make is that you can apply the actor model to any system of isolated processes. Whether the isolated processes live on a distributed system of networked computers or on the same computer is an implementation detail. The critical issue is that each actor should own and mutate its own state. Whether all actors run on the same thread or on separate threads is also an implementation detail. For instance, AtomVM is a lightweight implementation of the Beam (actor model) that runs on microcontrollers [0].

> The entire thrust of this thread is that you can have a more reliable system that is easier to reason about if you use specific constructs that each have less power

Easier to reason about, sure, fine. Your earlier comment claims the actor model is a dead end in non-distributed systems.

> Unstructured concurrency should be reserved exclusively for contexts where structured concurrency is impossible, which is what the actor model is for.

Results from my quick search on structured/unstructured concurrency were all references to Swift. Is this a Swift thing? In any case, the issue appears to be more about managing tasks that don't require a preemptive scheduler. As I see it, that issue appears orthogonal to distributed/non-distributed systems.

0. https://atomvm.org/
by wildzzz | 2026-02-02 14:04:25+00:00
We use Flex license server for so many pieces of software. It works well as long as everything is up and running. Several years ago, we merged with another company and slowly began to consolidate IT infrastructure. The license server was moved many times without giving proper notification to users until it eventually settled at the main DC we use. Then came the issue of renewing the license. Previously, license renewal was managed at the department level which means the users only need to go to their boss if there's an issue and only had to send one email to our local IT to apply a new license. Funding for licenses came out of a special budget so department heads didn't have to beg. Very simple and it worked fine for years. Now, everything is centralized which sounds great except that the people that manage the license server are so far removed from where we are that it can take months for a license renewal. You're not talking to people you have an email address for, you're submitting tickets to our central system where they forward it onto the license group somewhere. It used to be incredibly painful but has gotten better now that the license group is more aware of the entire division of employees that now require their services too.
by mbirth | 2026-02-02 14:04:30+00:00
Is it, though? What’s so different between Thuringia and Saxony that they both need separate administrations?

Why is it, that when you move between states, your tax office needs to print out your records, send them to your new state's office, only for some poor soul to type them into their system because each state uses a different system without any common exchange format? Make it make sense!
by twism | 2026-02-02 14:05:00+00:00
I've tried Termux but use the old irssiconnectbot (https://github.com/irssiconnectbot/irssiconnectbot) but with slight modifications over the years since its open source... along with an also modified hackerkeyboard (https://github.com/klausw/hackerskeyboard) to support my workflow which is heavy on emacs and GNU Screen.

The colors/graphics seem to be better on irssi and can also handle all the emacs and gnu screen keyboard chords and escape sequences.

I try every android terminal but nobody is really thinking about running more than simple commands.
by nntwozz | 2026-02-02 14:05:01+00:00
Yes you kind of feel like an extraterrestrial living like this, which could be another drawback.

I find comfort in these quotes however:

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti

and…

“I look crazy but I'm not. And the funny thing is that other people don't look crazy but they are.” — eden ahbez
by nashashmi | 2026-02-02 14:05:20+00:00
I understand the approach Satya took initially. He had a big investment in AI. He saw a theoretical value in AI supporting productivity. And he pushed his developers and creators to imagine and mock up ideas how AI would deliver.

Obviously the last part was disappointing. In hindsight, the push was far too aggressive, and too mediocre. We have a lot to learn from this try, about ourselves and about others.

Integration 2.0 will be or needs to be a bit more skewed towards low hanging fruits. I want a copilot for the help menu, and for the 1000 commands not in the toolbar, and a copilot enhancement to the search bar (which came from google!). And a natural language interface to bring up templates, open files, and look for images. Apple could have done this AI enhancement with settings, and added a start button to open apps.

As for "privacy", that is the first scream that comes out from people who have never touched the product. Assurety should have been made that all data would be local. This runs contrary to the "data is the new oil" direction, but it would have been a good way to entice the skeptics and eventually swallow them whole to give up their privacy (insert evil laugh here).
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-02 14:05:36+00:00
The change's effects are dependent on what each SKU reports as its Metal architecture, both as identifying string (the equivalent to running 'metal-arch' in the Mac CLI) and as generation 'gen' number. Most likely you're misinterpreting the change as not affecting the iPhone 16 Pro, where in fact it does.

The MLX folks have various rationales for not supporting the ANE (at least as of yet), but one of them is that any real support requires implementing explicit splits in the graph of computations, where ANE-suitable portions are to be dispatched to the ANE and everything else goes back to the GPUs. That's not necessarily trivial.
Show HN: Weather Haiku – AI-generated poetry for any location's current weather
by minor_drizzle | 2026-02-02 14:06:29+00:00
I built a site that generates haiku about the current weather for any location worldwide, using Open-Meteo for weather data and Gemini (2.5-flash-lite) for generation.

The site will use temperature, wind, humidity, precipitation etc to compose the haiku. The background gradient is decided by season, weather and time of day.

The hardest part was getting the AI to write interesting poetry instead of obvious clichés. Working with generative AI feels more like trying to train an animal than programming a computer. You can't just tell it "don't be boring". I ended up with 30+ randomized focus prompts (material reactions, how light changes, human activity, etc) that get mixed into each generation to encourage variety.

Made with vanilla PHP/JS. Happy to answer questions about the prompt engineering or anything else :)
by FeloniousHam | 2026-02-02 14:06:42+00:00
I don't want minimize the efforts of other manufacturers (I'm sure they'll all have Tesla's features in the next generation), but: my wife has a Subaru Outback, and the two systems are as close in functionality as humans are to chimpanzees. The differences are many, stark and subtle (that Subaru screen), I'd just say take a test drive with FSD.
by graemep | 2026-02-02 14:07:22+00:00
> Why do these companies put so much effort into fighting right to repair to avoid IP leak

Only if you believe they are truthful about the reason for fighting right to repair. I think the reason for fighting right to repair is to reduce the time before a replacement purchase is required.

> but on the other hand encourage their employees to vibe all company secrets into the cloud?

Lots of companies do ban or restrict usage of LLMs etc.
by rk122 | 2026-02-02 14:07:45+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Infinity AI, a small project that lets you generate short videos directly from text prompts.

The goal was to remove cameras, editing, and complex tools — just type and get a video.

This is still early, and I’d love feedback on:
– Video quality
– Use cases you’d want this for
– What feels missing

Demo + examples are on the site.
Happy to answer any questions.
by pratik227 | 2026-02-02 14:08:28+00:00
Since then, I’ve added a set of image tools that also run entirely client-side:
- Image compress, resize, crop, rotate, and format conversion
- Image → PDF and mixed image + PDF workflows
- Basic photo editing (text, filters, watermarks)
- Upscaling and background removal
- HTML/URL → image capture and face blurring

Everything runs locally in the browser (Canvas, WASM).
No backend, no uploads, no tracking.

For context, the original post saw ~9.5k visitors over two weeks.

Average visit duration was ~40s, which fits the single-task nature of the tools.

Posting as a progress update rather than a re-launch.
by Terretta | 2026-02-02 14:09:13+00:00
Don't tell me I'm not allowed to click buttons you put in my face.

Any jurisdiction where this is supposedly illegal, it hasn't been court tested seriously.*

Per your link: "What you're describing is essentially the extension AdNauseam. So far they have not had any legal troubles, but they technically could." That stance or an assertion it's not illegal is consistent throughout the thread, provided you aren't clicking your own ads.

"The industry" thinks you shouldn't be allowed to fast forward your own VCR through an ad either. They can take a flying .. lesson.

* Disclaimer: I don't know if that's true, but it sounds true.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-02 14:09:39+00:00
I haven't made any calculations, and it's more a hunch, but considering you usually need to remove hundreds of KG in order to make an impact on how much fuel is being spent, 40-50L of gas (~40KG difference between full and empty maybe?) would have an marginal effect on how much fuel is spent to carry a full tank vs 10% filled tank.

Besides, with a smaller tank, you'll make more trips to tank it, and also have less choice to go to gas stations that are further away but have cheaper price. Then again it becomes a question of "Do I want more time or more money?", back to square one :)

Edit: Also, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the fuel pump use fuel itself as a coolant or something? Never investigated myself, but some car-knower once told me that running the tank on low always isn't good for the fuel pump, or something like that. If that's true, running with 10% of the fuel would mean more maintenance too, potentially removing any savings in the first place.
Ask HN: Why not have a subreddit where all voting is done by a single AI?
by amichail | 2026-02-02 14:09:52+00:00
What if there were a subreddit where humans still write posts and comments, but all voting is done by an AI?

There would be no user voting at all. Instead, one AI handles every upvote and downvote according to guidance written by the subreddit moderator(s).

For example, it might assign 20 votes to one post and -5 votes to another. (Of course, this would require Reddit to implement a feature to allow this for these voting AIs.)

The key part is that the voting guidance is public. Anyone can read the rules that explain how the AI is supposed to vote. For example, the AI might be instructed to reward originality, clarity, kindness, strong evidence, or creative thinking, and to downvote low effort posts, repetition, hostility, or bad faith arguments.

Why this could be interesting:

* It removes mob dynamics, karma farming, and timing effects. Visibility depends on meeting the stated values, not popularity.

* The subreddit develops a very coherent culture. People learn how to write for the AI rather than reminding other humans to “read the rules.”

* Posting becomes a kind of skill. You are not chasing vibes, you are demonstrating that you understood and followed the principles.

* The advice itself becomes part of the experiment. Users can debate whether the AI’s guidance is good, flawed, biased, or incomplete.

Moderators could update the guidance over time and keep a changelog explaining why priorities shifted. There could even be meta threads where users suggest amendments, even if mods keep final control.

What do you think of this idea?
by aurareturn | 2026-02-02 14:09:53+00:00
Ok, semi-serious question: If you're extremely famous and rich like a Bill Gates and you want to have sex with younger girls (most men do), how would you do it?

Can't just walk into a brothel. Can't just call up an escort on craigslist. Can't be seen in a strip club. Employees talk too. Camera phones everywhere. Can't always trust your average Instagram sugar baby, she might talk and boast to her friends.

It'd be much better if I'm rich but not famous I think.
by marcusverus | 2026-02-02 14:10:31+00:00
Basically all centralization of political power in human history has been accomplished by force. See Rome, Persia, Germany, USSR, etc. etc. etc. Even the USA's transition from a union of united States to The United States occurred under force of arms.

Sadly, this centralization of political power has been a disaster for mankind IMO.

Even as we've transitioned from monarchies to democracies over the last few centuries, the trend has largely resulted in the replacement of actual, determinative choices with merely having a millionth of a share of a choice. Not a determinative choice, but a say.

Consider the holy roman empire, for example. [0]

Under this scheme of decentralization, people had an actual choice of their government. Say you were a merchant in Mühlhausen circa 1700, and you found yourself in opposition to your local government. You could simply move a short distance to a different area and be beholdened to an entirely different government. You'd have 50 choices within 100 miles! While it's true that the HRE was all under the administration of one government, but it was extremely weak. It lacked, for example, the ability to levy direct taxes. After unification in 1870, the same merchant would've had to move much further to escape his government, and his options had been diminished by 95%. After European unification, he would have to travel to another continent!

While democracy has given us control of our governments in theory, in practice the "choice" it offers is much less empowering than the determinative choice afforded by decentralization. The larger our political entities grow, the more diluted our "say" and the fewer full choices are available to us. In the United States, we have less than 1/100,000,000th of a share of the choice in our chief executive!

While democracy is obviously preferable to Aristocracy/Monarchy/Tyranny, on it's own it is still only a marginal improvement. At worst, you can still end up with 49.9% of people living under a government they oppose. Decentralization solves this lingering problem, because it allows people to self-sort in and out of countries they don't like, allowing for people who truly despise their governments to choose themselves a new government.

In the absence of such a safety valve, people are forced into a zero-sum struggle for power. It is rule or be ruled. Dominate or be dominated. We're seeing this in the United States right now. We're not at each other's throats because we hate each other. Not even because we hate each other's politics in the abstract. We're at each other's throats because neither side is content to be ruled by the other.

The same reason that centralized entities only arise by force is the same reason they fall apart in the end. People don't want them. They don't want to be dominated.

Centralization of political power forces people into an inescapable struggle for power. It is the enemy of peace and tranquility, and a blight on humanity.

[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Droysens-26.jpg
by sumtechguy | 2026-02-02 14:10:33+00:00
> The real issue was never AI in Windows It was AI with no clear user benefit.

I find it handy here and there. HOWEVER... There is no clear way to get rid of the thing. MS has added tons of features and then burry them in really obtuse ways to get rid of them if you can at all. That is the core of MS's user backlash. It makes people feel like they are not in control of their hardware. When I feed the machine 32 gig of ram and 8 to 12 is already taken up on fresh start something is seriously broken.

The second issue is people feel windows is not keeping up with its competitors (Linux, MacOS). They are throwing features in. When the benchmarks are where they are slowing yielding to their competitors.

The third issues is backwards compat is not as good as it used to be. They made backwards compat one of their key selling points. That is breaking in hundreds of subtle ways that piss people off. If I am going to lose my software to time rot why am I staying with this thing that randomly changes what the start menu looks like every 6 months and I have to figure out again where they put things. Plus now there is this copilot thing chirping all over the place.

CoPilot is not the issue, it is a symptom. It is the total lack of awareness MS has about its user base. It has been this way since windows 8 first launched. I use windows to launch my software and do things. There are 2 other viable OS's out there that do the same thing. If MS had put an advert into the message popup saying 'hey copilot is ready for your machine would you like to turn it on' they would have probably been in a better position. Instead it is on by default and you just get to deal with it. So now feel like 'gee thanks' hey what about these thousands of other issues? How many times are you going to break remote desktop again? How many weird directx 7/8/9 shims do I need to make my game launch this time? Oh an fix the backwards compat tool. It is broken too.

Windows 11 needs a 'service pack 2' moment. Where they focus on fixing as many bugs as they can. Lower the memory and CPU usage to as low as they can. Fixup the hundreds of backwards compat issues I see all over the net. Just well tested bug fixes.
by mpyne | 2026-02-02 14:10:34+00:00
And my point is simply that if it were obvious enough an idea that I thought of it after initially using my tool, you probably will want to look for more realistic examples of where a person thinks they came up with an idea that was really prompted back to them in an AI chat.

This isn't something with surprising nuance like how a McDonald's milkshake serves a non-food "job to be done" during a shopper's morning commute. As evidenced by all the others in this thread pointing out other tools that do similar things, it's a fairly obvious idea to come up with after actually using a new tool.

You'd be more likely to learn about it doing product comparisons of other tools, although since there is a lot of common art for AI training to draw from, yes it is also possible to hear about it from your AI first.
by master_crab | 2026-02-02 14:10:37+00:00
Slavery effectively disappeared in most of Christian Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages, because the Church opposed keeping Christian slaves. (Similarly, Islamic Europe had banned Muslim slaves.) As Christianity spread, slaves were no longer conveniently available, and the society had to adapt.

This requires a very bold, 115 font asterisk. Or rather it’s plain wrong. Mass slavery in Europe didn’t really end until serfdom was abolished (1800s). And let’s not even get started on the African slave trade which was managed and prospered off of from Europeans, both from direct sales and indirectly from slave labor. Also, many of those slaves converted to Christianity, so it wasn’t based on any religious affiliation.
by pjc50 | 2026-02-02 14:10:58+00:00
Statistia has them at a loss, but varying around breakeven: https://www.statista.com/statistics/299119/twitter-net-incom...

But that doesn't matter. It was bought as a toy and propaganda network. It can lose money indefinitely as long as its owner is paid by Tesla: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyk6kvyxvzo
by jcynix | 2026-02-02 14:11:10+00:00
With Termux I have rsync at hand, which can compute checksums, delete files after the transfer, etc. That's why I do my complete backup with Termux. And I sort the images on the phone into dated subfolders before syncing them.

And having tools like exiftool, ffmpeg, and ImageMagick among others available in Termux is wonderful.
by coldtea | 2026-02-02 14:12:06+00:00
The authentic quote “1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code” as some kind of goal that makes sense, even just for porting/rewriting, is embarassing enough from an OS vendor.

As @mrbungie says on this thread: "They took the stupidest metric ever and made a moronic target out of it"
by cess11 | 2026-02-02 14:12:30+00:00
Looks pretty ML:ish to me, even in a segment like this:

let parse_int64 (local_ buf) (sp : span) : int64# =
let mutable acc : int64# = #0L in
let mutable i = 0 in
let mutable valid = true in
while valid && i < I16.to_int sp.#len do
let c = Bytes.get buf (I16.to_int sp.#off + i) in
match c with
| '0' .. '9' ->
acc <- I64.add (I64.mul acc #10L) (I64.of_int (Char.code c - 48));
i <- i + 1
| _ -> valid <- false
done;
acc
by titzer | 2026-02-02 14:12:31+00:00
It's so frustrating when software knows that something is wrong and won't tell you what it is. "An error occurred". Oh, did it now? "There's nothing you can do about it except hit this X. We couldn't be bothered to think about this case or provide you with any information whatsoever that would be useful to either you or future us to diagnose it. Not even an internal code. Not a line number or even a file! But it did occur nonetheless, and we have interrupted your workflow to let you now that it did. And we're not even sorry."