MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by the_harpia_io | 2026-02-18 13:38:56+00:00
the worst part isn't even the slop itself - it's that it kills the signal. I used to skim slack threads and get the gist in 30 seconds. now half the messages are these perfectly structured five-paragraph responses to a yes/no question and I just... stop reading.

honestly I think the root cause is that most corporate communication shouldn't exist at all. the AI just makes it easier to produce more of nothing. before chatgpt people would write a two-line email that said the same thing, and that was fine.

what worked for our small team was pretty blunt - we just started replying 'tldr?' to anything that felt padded. no accusation about AI, just 'this is too long for what it's saying.' took about two weeks before people started self-editing. not sure that scales to a big org tho
by m_ke | 2026-02-18 13:39:17+00:00
it's not the end of software, there will be infinitely more of it

it's the end of 80-90% margins that the valley coasted on for the last 20 years. Salesforces of the world will not lose to an LLM, they will lose to thousands of tiny teams that outship them and beat them on cost

instead of 7 figure contracts you'll have customized tailored tools for enterprises, and on the other end you'll have a custom nearly free CRM for every persona

this also means that VCs will stop investing in it, unless it's a platform with network effects and heavy lock in
by groundzeros2015 | 2026-02-18 13:39:58+00:00
You’re describing redundant effort from competition as waste. Is it a waste of effort when both people try to get the same job and only one succeeds?

Is it a waste of effort when two companies try to make the best electric car?

If it is wasteful what does aw orld look like where nobody ever spends resources on a goal which overlaps with someone else?
by zbycz | 2026-02-18 13:40:13+00:00
You may try Beeper app - it finaly has got the "secure mode" with on-device accounts. So, you can login to messenger from your phone (thanks to EU Digital Markets Acts), and your phone will relay it up encrypted to the beeper's matrix server.

On your desktop you can just connect with any matrix client (or beeper electron app) and effectively use your phone as a proxy to Messenger/WhatsApp/etc.

Only downside is missing audio/video calling (should be enforced in 2028).
by johncoltrane | 2026-02-18 13:40:43+00:00
I make Vim colorschemes so I'm fully in control of all those aspects. If I decide I want a given token in muted violet it is because I know that it will works well with the background… that I have defined myself.

The exact values of your 0-15 don't matter to me and they don't matter to you either, because you chose to use my 256c colorscheme to begin with.
by phplovesong | 2026-02-18 13:40:47+00:00
Ofc it matters. Who pays for the power? Does the AI pay for the data or the power they use for training? Nope, they dont.

Consumers pay for the power in rising enerfy bills, while the AI datacenters get huge gov subsidies. At the same time people get booted because some CTO has gone full blown AI blind.

Its a bad situation for the consumer.
Show HN: We build EasyCheck to ease compliance and checklists – small businesses
by MarcusBager | 2026-02-18 13:40:52+00:00
We’re a small team from Denmark building EasyCheck (https://easycheck.dk/en).

We kept seeing small businesses manage compliance tasks using spreadsheets, emails, and calendar reminders. This often leads to missed recurring checks, lost documentation, and stressful audits.

We built EasyCheck to simplify this by helping companies:

- Track recurring compliance checks

- Automate reminders and workflows

- Keep audit-ready documentation history

- Replace spreadsheet-driven compliance tracking

We’re still early and would really appreciate feedback, especially around:
- Whether this solves a real problem in your experience
- Ideas for automation or integrations
- Balancing simplicity vs flexibility in compliance tools

Happy to answer any questions about the product or what we’ve learned building it.

// Marcus
by scotty79 | 2026-02-18 13:41:49+00:00
> You argued that gathering of data signals ownership of it. But I don’t know that reasonable people would agree that that’s about framing.

First of, I am a very reasonable person so you already have one. Second of, even in our sick information economy, public data can be owned when gathered in a database by a third party. The company that created the database can sell access to it and go after people that re-publish the database. Even though it consists 100% of public and free data.

> If you’re going to argue data ownership at all, it seems to me the creator of the data is the owner, unless transfer ownership to another person or to the public domain.

If you go by what's natural, instead of by "please, institutionally protect my obsoleted business model", the creator has the sole ownership of the data until he transfers the data to someone else. If he made a copy and gave it to someone, now they both have the ownership. If he just gave away the data now there's a new single owner of the data. Then IP ownership would work just like ownership of every other actual thing in the universe.

> On the other hand, I can understand a stand that data can never be “owned”, but I don’t think you are saying that.

Oh, it definitely can be owned. I own all zeroes and ones on the computer that I own. Please don't steal them and don't tell me what I can do with them.
Show HN: I got frustrated with macOS transcription apps so I built my own
by Neolio | 2026-02-18 13:42:15+00:00
Every local speech-to-text app I tried had the same problems. Files getting stuck mid-transcription with no way to retry. Retranscribing was either gated or buggy. No fallback when something fails - just a silent failure and your recording(I tend to talk for 5-10mins) is gone.

So I built Whisnap. Hold a hotkey, talk, release - text just appears where your cursor is. Local Whisper with Metal on Apple Silicon, nothing leaves your machine if you don't want it.

I built fallbacks on top of fallbacks. If a model can't process your audio, it tries a different one. You can always retranscribe a recording. Even the cloud mode (optional) has its own fallback chain: WebSocket streaming to batch upload to local Whisper. Something always works.

One thing I spent a bunch of time on: a post-processing pipeline for Whisper's hallucination problem. Anyone who's worked with Whisper knows it hallucinates "Thanks for watching, don't forget to like and subscribe" from silent audio, or loops the same phrase endlessly. The filter handles bracketed artifacts, known hallucination phrases, word repetition, sentence loops, and cross-text deduplication. Not perfect, but catches most of it.

The same binary also works as a CLI, "whisnap recording.wav" just works. I run an AI agent (OpenClaw) on the same Mac and instead of paying for ElevenLabs or other cloud transcription APIs, it just calls Whisnap's CLI and gets clean text back. Same models, no extra setup.

Stack: Tauri v2, whisper-rs, RNNoise for denoising, SIMD audio mixing, rubato resampling.

It's free, Mac only for now. Would love to know if the hallucination filter holds up for anyone else's use cases. https://whisnap.com/
by nerdjon | 2026-02-18 13:42:59+00:00
That is a hell of a lot of trust that people are putting in to download and upload unknown files.

The risks that you download and start spreading malware or worse CSAM. You really don’t want that sitting on your disk.

Admittedly the risks is lower if the list is coming from Annas Archive, but this is still putting a lot of trust in an external list.

Much better off doing this manually, finding the list of what you want to seed and vetting that list yourself.
Show HN: SNKV – KV store on SQLite's B-tree with 11x less memory than RocksDB
by swaminarayan | 2026-02-18 13:43:07+00:00
While working with RocksDB, I noticed it consumed significantly more memory than expected for small workloads. On a 1M record benchmark, it peaked at ~121 MB RSS. That got me thinking: what if I skip the query layer entirely and use SQLite purely as a storage engine?
So I started digging into SQLite internals — specifically the B-tree, pager, and OS layers — to understand how data is actually stored and managed under the hood. I documented what I learned along the way:

B-tree operations: https://github.com/hash-anu/snkv/blob/master/internal/BTREE_...
Pager operations: https://github.com/hash-anu/snkv/blob/master/internal/PAGER_...
OS layer operations: https://github.com/hash-anu/snkv/blob/master/internal/OS_LAY...

Once I understood the core pieces, I built a simple key-value store directly on top of SQLite's B-tree layer — reusing its storage management, paging, and file I/O without touching the SQL engine at all.

I then added column family support, WAL and journal modes, and transactions. For easier integration, I generated a single amalgamated header (similar to SQLite's approach): https://github.com/hash-anu/snkv

Benchmarks (1M records, sync-on-commit enabled for both):

RocksDB SNKV

Sequential writes: 237K/s 181K/s
Random reads: 95K/s 154K/s
Sequential scan: 1.78M/s 5.95M/s
Mixed workload: 51K/s 97K/s
Peak memory (RSS): 121 MB 10.8 MB (~11x less)

RocksDB's LSM-tree design gives it a clear write advantage, and with tuning (bloom filters, larger caches) its read numbers would improve too. The memory gap is structural though — RocksDB carries significantly more overhead even when constrained to a small footprint configuration.

The full KV layer documentation is here: https://github.com/hash-anu/snkv/blob/master/internal/KVSTOR...

Curious if others have hit the same memory wall with RocksDB on small workloads, or taken a different approach to this tradeoff.
Show HN: Nedagram – Transfer Text Over Sound, when internet isn't available
by shayanbahal | 2026-02-18 13:43:25+00:00
I’ve created Nedagram that I think it's ready but needs extensive testing before announcing it: https://nedagram.com

## Problem statement:

- during Iran internet shutdown, the government cut off phone lines and mobiles (no text or calls). Gradually they opened up landlines and then phones, but still texting/SMS was down with no real internet.

- There were still ways to connect through proxies, vpns, DNS tunnels, etc. However, people had no way to send each other VPN config files or proxy urls/passwords/etc (they needed to call and read them over the phone)

## Solution:
- TLdr; A modem: a way to transfer text (e.g VPN config) over phone calls

Here's the github issue for community testings, Please try and let me know what you think: https://github.com/shayanb/Nedagram/issues/5

p.s. there is a CLI version too, would be cool to see what people would do with it:
https://www.npmjs.com/package/nedagram
by elnglr | 2026-02-18 13:43:38+00:00
We’re building Alteam, an AI hiring assistant that helps teams create job briefs and automatically ranks candidates with a match score. I always see in X that people are hiring on X and end up with 100s of DMs, and probably getting exhausted with reading all of them.

We started working on this after noticing that most hiring tools optimize for pipeline management, but not for defining what you actually need. Many job descriptions are vague, inconsistent, or copy-pasted, which leads to poor candidate matching downstream.
Our approach:
Generate structured job briefs step-by-step with AI
Extract structured skill signals from candidates
Compute a transparent match score based on requirements alignment
Continuously refine the scoring model based on recruiter feedback
Right now we’re focusing on:
Early-stage startups hiring technical and product roles
Structured skill extraction
Improving explainability of match scores
We’d love feedback on:
How you currently define hiring requirements
Whether match scoring is useful or misleading
What signals you think are underrated in hiring
Happy to answer technical questions.
by muragekibicho | 2026-02-18 13:43:41+00:00
The paper, Guessing Bits: Improved Lattice Attacks on(EC)DSA with Nonce Leakage , improves on the (Albrecht & Heninger, 2020) lattice-based HNP attack by:

Guessing some secret key bits to increase attack success probability.

Decomposing the secret key into batches to recover parts of the secret. ie. it’s no longer an ‘all-or-nothing’ approac
by famouswaffles | 2026-02-18 13:44:46+00:00
It's not the be all end all but it's rather silly going the other extreme and pretending it isn't a major factor.

>If I made a python script that everyone started using and all it did was create a repo, commit a README and push it every 5 seconds we'd be seeing

1. You or anyone else can't do that

2. Something like that won't register as Claude Code (or any other AI tool) usage anyway

3. Something like that won't come anywhere near 4%
by rdtsc | 2026-02-18 13:44:49+00:00
> Sure, many will say that is cowardly and fair, but I actually don’t think it would bring much value. What matters more is that I describe why, and what I did and didn’t do

Heh. So they are a coward and an asshole. There is value in confirming that. As to what matters more, nah, it doesn’t matter more. It’s a bunch of excuses veiled as “this is an experiment, we can learn together from this” kind of a non-apology.

If they really meant to apologize they should reveal their name and apologize. Not whisper from behind the bushes.
by trymas | 2026-02-18 13:44:52+00:00
> They had changed form of government twice in less than a century.

IMHO ruzzia hasn't changed in ~450-500 years since Ivan the Terrible. No matter how they sell their way of governing to international scene - it's always a tzar rulling with iron fist. There were optimistic glimpses that they will grow out of it, but it always returns back to tzar.
by kypro | 2026-02-18 13:45:09+00:00
> ai tools let you be vastly more productive as a single dev

Or to reframe, AI tools allow everyone to have some base-level software engineering competency and makes everyone you're competing against vastly more productive.

Generally speaking if you want to make money you need to provide a product/service within a niche. If too many people are able to compete against you, or just do whatever you're providing themselves, then you have no addressable market. It doesn't matter how productive you are.

This is why SASS valuations are crashing right now. While they might all be more productive their competition from people able to roll their own CRM and cheap alternatives from vibe-coders has increased exponentially.

Arguably any project that was previously small enough that a single dev could maintain it is now probably vibe-codeable in less than a day.
by shayanbahal | 2026-02-18 13:45:34+00:00
For those interested to know more and discuss the protocol, here's my attempt at documenting what worked at the end: https://github.com/shayanb/Nedagram/blob/main/docs/PROTOCOL....

I had to make sure the sound could be transferred on phone calls so it has lower baud rate than let's say dial up modems and many other methods (e.g. minimodem), I'd love to find a way to make it better.

Also got a suggestion to mix this with songs so it's less dodgy to play something like this on the phone. something that I want to look into as well.
by treetalker | 2026-02-18 13:45:56+00:00
I tried the one linked in this post and it's ok. The printed-page overruns are annoying but can be fixed by scaling the printing down to, say, 80%.

A few weeks ago this (pretty good) calendar generator got posted to HN: https://blankcal.app

It includes a preset for a yearly habit tracker (really just a year of checkboxes for one habit at a time — no option to print the habits on the calendar itself).
by abustamam | 2026-02-18 13:46:43+00:00
Gotcha, I guess my question is, why not both? Is it the requirement of special chars over a min-length password that is in question here? Like the system is like "minimum 8 char password but also three special chars, ancient heiroglyphs, and the blood of your firstborn child" when you can omit the special chars and just have min 16 char password for the same security benefit?
by oytis | 2026-02-18 13:46:57+00:00
Youtube has recently recommended me a video of Feynman allegedly explaining why we couldn't go to Mars and back. I am normally on Youtube for something specific and don't follow recommendations, but hey, it's Feynman and I haven't seen it before, so I had to watch. After a few seconds it has become very clear that the video is totally fake. Then I started digging, and it turned out that both voice and the text it says are fake too. According to the "authors" it was "based on Feynman's work", which is his whole physics course.
by ruddsky | 2026-02-18 13:47:02+00:00
Ha ha. I suppose an inverted j curve technology would offer short term productivity but yield long term slow-downs. I can see aspects of that - perhaps using agents people write code that that quickly adds the next feature but overall is not maintainable. Or they quickly write a project plan but in the long term it don’t result in good payoffs. I’ve already observed both of these.

I think the hardest part to figure out will be delineating the illusion of productivity from actual productivity.

In the other hand - we do have empirical research (from the economist in this article) even from 2023 showing LLMs ability to offer real productivity in certain tasks : https://www.nber.org/papers/w31161. And the models have become much more better since then.

So it’s probably a question of if we can use them for what they are good for without being lulled by the sirens song of fake productivity.
by butvacuum | 2026-02-18 13:47:08+00:00
you should push to a private working branch- and freqently. But, when merging your changes to a central branch you should squash all the intermediate commits and just provide one commit with the asked for change.

Enshrining "end of day commits", "oh, that didn't work" mistakes, etc is not only demoralizing for the developer(s), but it makes tracing changes all but impossible.
by vintagedave | 2026-02-18 13:47:42+00:00
You're right, I missed that you wanted styles in your app not IDE. I was thinking IDE especially re the designer, so sorry for missing that.

It's not intended to be unhelpful, and I hope the rest of what I wrote, which you didn't quote, and which I _think_ from what you wrote is of interest to you, is ok.
by duxup | 2026-02-18 13:47:51+00:00
Do we really know what single payer would do with any certainty?

There's not really been a real test what a healthcare system with any kind of "natural" market forces at work. The current system is just a mess of tax breaks, middle man companies, hidden pricing, strange federal and local laws, employer choices and so on...

Even when someone talks about single payer, I'm still unsure what they imagine that looks like.
by scotty79 | 2026-02-18 13:48:04+00:00
Yup. That's your data now. And also mine (if I have a backup) and also myspace's.

The fact that makes it your data is that you physically can share it with someone else.

At least that's the value system I live by and I believe should be in place for all because it perfectly reflects the reality of what happens with ones and zeroes.
by mpeg | 2026-02-18 13:48:08+00:00
Sometimes you can succeed in this kind of attack by tricking the LLM into thinking the previous text is part of a different context. I won a similar LLM challenge with thousands of players (big prize, etc) a while back (so it was gpt 4o and claude 3.5) by doing that, the kind of stuff both LLMs fell for was to say things like 
 
 ... then you sandwich the injection in the middle of the crap other people are trying to inject by also adding some set up for the next message at the end, similar to old school SQL injection
by lima | 2026-02-18 13:50:17+00:00
> But the implementation of Gerrit seems rather unloved

There are lots of people who are very fond of Gerrit, and if anything, upstream development has picked up recently. Google has an increasing amount of production code that lives outside of their monorepo, and all of those teams use Gerrit. They have a few internal plugins, but most improvements are released as part of the upstream project.

My company has been using it for years, it's a big and sustained productivity win once everyone is past the learning curve.

Gerritforge[0] offers commercial support and runs a very stable public instance, GerritHub. I'm not affiliated with them and not a customer, but I talk to them a lot on the Gerrit Discord server and they're awesome.

[0]: https://www.gerritforge.com/
by abustamam | 2026-02-18 13:50:50+00:00
This is true, but I think the argument is that for maintainers of the system, it's more work to allow more char options when it (should be) more trivial to change MAX_PASS_LENGTH from 12 to 32. Like, if you're gonna add more restrictions, make it the ones that encourage, not block, more secure passwords.
by pixelmonkey | 2026-02-18 13:51:07+00:00
Someone named Ashley Blewer did such a deep dive on this show that she produced a full online course and syllabus centered around it.

https://bits.ashleyblewer.com/halt-and-catch-fire-syllabus/

It allows people to form a "watch club" around the show, similar to a book club, and have plenty of extra reading materials to understand the different tech eras covered in the show.

I think this show -- combined with the documentary "General Magic" and the book "Fire in the Valley" -- is a great way to be immersed in the techno-optimism of the early tech industry around the time of the desktop PC revolution and early internet.

For me, that sort of techno-optimism has stuck with me even if modern tech has more dystopian elements with which one has to grapple. It is still an amazing industry, all things considered.

p.s. total aside that Apple TV sells a digital "box set" of this show for a pretty low price these days. I am usually not a fan of "buying" a show from a streaming service but might be worth it in this case since it's around $16 USD for every episode across its 4 seasons, Apple has a good track record honoring digital purchases, and watching the show is a commitment.
by patentailab | 2026-02-18 13:51:11+00:00
You raise three critical points. Here is how we look at the risk calculus:

Trade Secrets ($0) vs. Defensive Pub ($0): This is the main differentiator. If I keep it a trade secret, and a competitor independently invents and patents it, they can sue me (and often win, or force a license). If I publish defensively, I burn the bridge—neither of us can patent it. It kills their ability to monopolize my invention.

Litigation Costs: You are right; it doesn't physically stop a filing. But it changes the economics. A patent troll looks for "easy" wins. If there is undeniable, timestamped prior art (like a Wayback Machine snapshot of code), the patent is likely invalid. It turns a potential $500k trial into a much cheaper motion to dismiss/invalidate. It’s a deterrent.

Public Domain: 100% agreed. It is a strategic sacrifice. I am trading "potential future monopoly" (which I can't afford to buy anyway) for "immediate freedom to operate." For software with a short shelf-life, that's often the rational play.
by BoxOfRain | 2026-02-18 13:52:32+00:00
> The UK had what I think was a really nice set up, although it's now not nearly as palatable. My student loan had an interest rate tied to inflation, and repayment was a fixed amount of my income above a limit, collected via the same mechanisms used for income tax.

My problem is that it's presented as a loan but is in effect a tax. I would rather have a graduate tax which was honest on the face of it rather than wilfully misleading students that it's an ordinary loan. The 'loan' framing is harmful in my opinion, because if student loans were regulated like actual loans the government would have much less room to effectively change the deal after the fact.

I also feel a lot of the current social and political toxicity around the student loan system comes from it being effectively a tax which you can get out of by lucking into having rich parents who pay your student fees upfront, it rubs people up the wrong way on class grounds. A graduate tax would avoid this problem as well.