MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AVocaloidFaN | 2026-03-01 23:05:17+00:00
Assuming it's a relatively cheap e-bike with a motor on the rear wheel (a hub motor), that's likely the motor being starved out of phase amps that create torque, rather than the motor being weak. Especially if it's large and heavy Direct Drive motor with no internal gearing. These need a strong controller (power supply) to feed them current, as voltage doesn't matter for torque.

But generally it's not the motor itself that's weak, it's just got a weak power supply (and potentially weak battery BMS. Some controllers tie phase amp output to battery amp input by some 2 to 2.5x multiplication ratio.)

Going from a generic KT 22A controller to a 35A KT will give over +50% torque. Up till the motor hits magnetic saturation, torque scales linearly with the amps. The thinnest kind of direct drive (27mm magnets) can hit 80-90nm too. Most of those are 30mm nowadays and can push 100nm tho.

On the geared hub motor side, the G062 (most 750w bikes use clones of it) can push 90nm before there's a risk of stripping nylon gears. Smaller ones like the G310 may strip gears earlier. These generally need less amps to produce torque than direct drive, so they work better with poor electrical systems.

Worth mentioning that wheel size matters for torque on hub motors. Larger wheels need more torque to climb (thrust). And also motor wattage doesn't mean much for torque (phase amps from the controller and gearing affect that even on bikes sold with the same wattage rating).

I also find the throttle gatekeeping or wattage gatekeeping a bit silly. Going 25kmh by throttle or peddling has no difference in how dangerous a cyclist is on the road. They should cap top speed and acceleration on throttles, but banning them outright unless someone is doing a minimum cycling motion on the pedals is a wrong regulatory approach and limits accessibility.

Throttles above 6kmh (walk assist) are banned across the whole of Europe. Judging by how heavily the Netherlands pushed for the EU-wide throttle ban, and putting my tin foil hat on, I can assume this was done as regulatory capture to ban Chinese ebikes from local stores, as they come with throttles and aren't usually capped at 25kmh on pedal assist. Netherlands produced ebikes are all pedal assist only, mid-drive, and have very poor batteries and electrical stuff for the (over 2x) price they're sold for. And now they have less competition. EU also has a 45% tariff on "e-bike part" imports...

I would also like a regulatory framework to register and insure a faster e-bike (as imo they should not cap wattage and cripple the hill climbing torque, only speed/acceleration) for adults. Right now you can only register one that has a license in EU. If you build your own, it can never be legal, even if you have a motorcycle license and want to insure it. This class of e-bike is impossible to drive legally right now.

L1-b class registration can technically do this, but it needs the bike to be registered in Europe. No e-bike has this. No manufacturers sell class L1-b e-bikes registered in the EU. Only some electric motorcycles afaik.
by wongarsu | 2026-03-01 23:05:29+00:00
I would agree that most crypto is not very good money. It's more like a speculative investment that just happens to be easy to exchange

I don't think fake money is the right term though. It's just as much money as the US dollar or the Euro, and it isn't pretending to be some other currency (like say a fake bill). It just happens to be not very good at the job of being money
by epsylon | 2026-03-01 23:05:35+00:00
> Junior devs have always been useless. You used to give them tasks that take them a week or two even though a senior engineer could do it in a couple hours, not because you wanted them to contribute, but because you wanted them to learn to contribute.

I don't know, I've known kids who can run circles around a lot of seniors, whether it's knowledge, coding chops or just intuition. The reason a newcomer takes a week to complete a task that requires two hours is because the senior has already learn all the ins and outs of the crappy software lifetime processes (usually dealing with half broken build / code review / ticket systems)
by BeefySwain | 2026-03-01 23:06:01+00:00
Can someone explain what the hell is going on here?

Do websites want to prevent automated tooling, as indicated by everyone putting everything behind Cloudfare and CAPTCHAs since forever, or do websites want you to be able to automate things? Because I don't see how you can have both.

If I'm using Selenium it's a problem, but if I'm using Claude it's fine??
by mcdeltat | 2026-03-01 23:06:18+00:00
As someone who has struggled with social anxiety over the years and has thought about this a lot, I have some thoughts.

It's all nice to imagine everyone talking to each other, but the reality is that in (western?) society, we have kinda collectively decided that socialisation is to be avoided. Either it's too weird, too boring, or too unsafe. I mean have you tried randomly talking to people? Most don't seem very open to it.

Also it doesn't help that the little "pretext" scenarios that can lead to socialising are being systematically eliminated from our lives.

And finally, if you're neurodivergent or otherwise aren't perfectly typical, enjoy people thinking you're weird anyway.
by celsoazevedo | 2026-03-01 23:06:20+00:00
Funny, as someone that uses Android, sideloads apps, and is the "tech guy" for some older people, I went "yep, Google's own Play Store is full of shitty apps".

I recommend getting an Android phone (there are cheap Google Pixels out there) and try to sideload an app. Also browse the web a bit without an adblocker. I'd be surprised if by the end of the experiment you thought that sideloading is the reason their grandma's phone is full of crap.
Show HN: Service Book – Smart maintenance tracking for every car owner
by sectorthree | 2026-03-01 23:06:22+00:00
I built a web app that generates personalized maintenance schedules based on your vehicle's year, make, and model. It cross-references NHTSA recall databases automatically, tracks service history, monitors warranty status, and integrates with Smartcar's API for live odometer and diagnostic data from connected vehicles.

Stack: Next.js (TypeScript), Tailwind, Supabase (auth, Postgres, RLS for tenant isolation), Vercel, Stripe. The Smartcar OAuth integration handles the Connected Car piece — currently supports most 2015+ vehicles from major manufacturers. Solo developer, built under Sector Three LLC.

Free tier available, paid plans from $2.99/mo. Looking for feedback on the product and the approach — especially from anyone who's worked with vehicle data APIs or built consumer tools in this space.

Your Service Book (https://yourservicebook.com/)
Your Service Book — Smart Vehicle Maintenance Tracking
Track every oil change, tire rotation & service for your car. Smart reminders, 100+ maintenance items, VIN decode & full history.
by rhubarbtree | 2026-03-01 23:06:27+00:00
I don’t know if this is related, but the standards of CS university courses in the UK are objectively way below what they were 25 years ago. You can compare two syllabuses from the same course and the difference is shocking.

It may be AI has raised the bar, but also that junior devs out of uni are just much worse than they used to be.
by jacquesm | 2026-03-01 23:06:53+00:00
I would never take that pack on a train (or any other closed transport). That would be criminal, but then again, I think that that's the case for all e-bikes. I've seen way too many videos of packs going up without a warning and there is a ton of really bad advice out there from well meaning individuals who have absolutely no idea what they are doing.

The welds on this pack are very good, I have checked and re-checked all of them, inspected the pack using a FLIR while running at maximum charge / discharge just to make sure there is no hidden jump in resistance or a bad cell. The whole thing is wrapped in shock absorbent foam but it still is a massive pack and if it were to go into thermal runaway there is just too much energy there to be dealt with.

It stays outside and is charged outside and I'm monitoring the cells groups to mV precision to make sure that they're not misbehaving. I'm not taking any risks with 170 charged 18650s, if I would so much as drop or bump the bike I would discharge the pack and dismantle it.
by nobulexdev | 2026-03-01 23:07:08+00:00
You're right with the 134K point. The actual cryptographic kernel (covenant building, verification, hash-chaining) is just about 3-4K lines. The rest are just adapters, plugins and test harnesses. I should lead with that number.
With enforcement, the covenant itself isn't the enforcement. Middleware intercepts tool calls before the execution and blocks the violations. But you're right that this only works for constraints you can express as rules. "No external calls" and "rate limit 100/hour" are enforceable. "Don't discriminate" is not — that's a fundamentally harder problem and I'm not pretending that it solves it.
The small trustable core advice is truly good and probably what I should focus on next. Thank you.
by borissk | 2026-03-01 23:07:27+00:00
Are the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics Beginning to Dissolve? I don’t think so.

Zurek’s Decoherence and Quantum Darwinism is thought-provoking, but it’s still speculation without broad buy-in from researchers. We might need ASI to crack these mysteries — our brains weren’t built for this kind of problem.
by vector_spaces | 2026-03-01 23:07:35+00:00
Letting curiosity be the motivator behind starting these conversations and cultivating curiosity more broadly can help -- or at least I have found it to be helpful in making initiating feel less forced. I wonder about people's jobs or the reasons they are visiting a place or what they think about what's happening nearby, or just generally who they are.

One antipattern I've encountered with this approach tho is that sometimes anxious people will exhaust their conversation partners with a battery of questions. Even if thoughtful, this can sometimes have the effect of exhausting your partner, and tends to keep the conversation steered away from actual connection. YMMV, but either way be mindful and make it a point to share yourself
Show HN: Joey – MCP client that runs on your phone
by benkaiser | 2026-03-01 23:08:14+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been watching the rise of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) with interest. While it’s gaining traction in the enterprise space for internal tools and databases, I’m convinced we’re heading toward a future where consumers will interact with all sorts of remote services via MCP. The problem I hit was that while the ecosystem is growing, there wasn't a great way to use remote MCP servers from a mobile device without a monthly subscription. I wanted a high-quality native experience on my phone that I actually owned, so I built Joey.

Joey is a mobile-first AI chat client that connects to any model via OpenRouter and supports remote MCP servers over HTTP. It handles the full agentic loop, including many MCP features like sampling, elicitation, and OAuth. All your OAuth tokens and history stay on your device since there is no middle-man proxy server, and I collect no telemetry.

The project is source-available under the FSL-1.1-MIT license. Since it is a standard Flutter app, it is easy to build it yourself and deploy to your own device if you have the SDK installed. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the future of consumer MCP and how we'll be managing these tools on the go.

GitHub: https://github.com/benkaiser/joey-mcp-client
by cbushko | 2026-03-01 23:08:27+00:00
All of those terminals work for you now because someone went and added terminfo to ncurses which distributed it across all versions of linux.

Kitty needed to do it too back in 2018.

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-ncurses/2018-09/msg00...

Note: Ghostty follows the same pattern as Kitty where they a) use their own terminfo, b) distribute it when ssh'ing (it gets pushed to the remote server) and c) added it to ncurses so that it will eventually go away.
by caditinpiscinam | 2026-03-01 23:08:29+00:00
It makes me sad that my reaction to this piece is so cynical, but I really think that 90% of the "how" in this article is "be an older British lady". If you're missing that vital piece you'll quickly meet many people who "don't have any money", or just remembered they meant to be walking on the other side of the street, or worse. Talking to strangers when people see you as a threat feels really shitty (for everyone involved) and can be dangerous.
by davidee | 2026-03-01 23:08:56+00:00
That tracks for me; longtime claude, claude code pro subscriber (not all of it has been good - but that's neither here nor there).

Over the last few iterations of Sonnet and Opus, anthropic has definitely trained me to ask it to explain something "in detail" (or even "in great detail") when I want as much nuance as possible.

It used to be the inverse - way too much detail when I didn't want it.
by galangalalgol | 2026-03-01 23:10:11+00:00
I'm from the US and not the Midwest. Not rural either. If I'm clearly doing something it might bother me, otherwise I would find it nice to meet someone new. I have mild asd and large gatherings cause anxiety, but if I'm just sitting people watching or on a stroll, talking to one or two people wouldn't bother or stress me.
by nobulexdev | 2026-03-01 23:10:13+00:00
Your Gmail CLI is doing the right thing with manually restricting what the agent will be able to do and logging actions. Nobulex is more of the generalized version of that pattern.

The difference: your CLI controls one agent on one tool with rules you have hardcoded. Nobulex gives you signed, immutable constraints that third parties can verify independently. The logs are hash-chained so nobody (including you) can tamper with them after the fact. And the constraints are the cryptographically bound to the agent's identity.

If you are truly the only one who needs to trust your agent, your approach works fine. Nobulex matters when someone else needs to verify what your agent has done, a regulator, a customer and a counterparty.
by jacquesm | 2026-03-01 23:10:34+00:00
Yes, I'm pedaling just fine, thank you for asking.

The range on this thing is not that large even when you are pedaling strongly, it just uses a lot of power. As you probably know the power consumption of a bike goes up considerably as the speed increases, this is NL and while we don't have hills we do have wind, and plenty of it. Add in a 40 to 45 kph top speed and you can see the battery dwindle in real time.

As for pedaling if the battery is low: I have a bad leg, which is why I ride these to begin with, they help me to get started at traffic lights, which we have a lot of. Once at speed I can ride just fine but getting up to speed really hurts.
by aziaziazi | 2026-03-01 23:11:38+00:00
If someone makes a decision base on wrong information, what’s to blame: the informations he got or his judgement ability?

Two dimensions to interpret this:

- article author judgement on what’s healthy based solely on its personal nutritional knowledge at the moment.

- the judgement of his decision, solely on the details of this post.

IMHO the only fault here is to omit more information he was basing his decision. But reading between the lines: he repeat being "hungry" but never saying "staving". That’s a huge difference: being hungry isn’t a health hasard.
by Aurornis | 2026-03-01 23:11:50+00:00
> why is the throttle the issue and not just the 45MPH?

The bikes with throttles are not legally e-bikes, so the products on the market ignore all of the other e-bike restrictions too. They have much more power and higher top speeds.

Even if they were fully limited, pedaling ensure more rider engagement and changes how people ride them. When you have to put some effort, however small, into moving the bike around you ride differently than if it's an effortless throttle input.
by spot5010 | 2026-03-01 23:12:39+00:00
The part that I have trouble wrapping around with many worlds interpretation is how I as an observer end up in one of the many bifurcations. Any links you can share that will help me with understanding that is welcome!

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-manyworlds/) goes into this in some depth, and it seems like the right way to think about it is say that "I" in one branch is a different entity than the "I" in a different branch. I have somehow not been able to grok it yet.

And I agree about the naming. I really dislike the name "many worlds interpretation", which seems to imply that we have to postulate the existence of these additional worlds, whereas in fact they are branches of the wavefunction exactly predicted by standard quantum mechanics.
by nobulexdev | 2026-03-01 23:13:04+00:00
Good question.

The Enforcement and verification serve for a different audience.

Enforcement will protect you as it stops your agent from doing something it shouldn't. Verification protects everyone else, as it lets a third party independently confirm that the enforcement actually happened, without trusting you.
You say "my agent followed the rules," while the regulator says "prove it." The hash-chained logs and signed covenants are the proof. Without verification, it's just your word.
Tell HN: Discover using old phone numbers from data broker for SMS 2FA
by throwawaycDpvY | 2026-03-01 23:13:06+00:00
I don’t know if this is “ask” or “tell” but there’s a fairly egregious issue going on with Discover Bank and I’m surprised this hasn’t gotten more attention.

Back in January, when signing into discover.com, I was prompted for a 2FA SMS security code. But this time I was given two phone numbers to choose from. The first number was my actual phone number which matches my Discover profile. The second number was an old phone number from years ago that is no longer mine and I don’t have access to anymore.

I called Discover and the rep confirmed that this phantom number isn’t anywhere in my Discover profile or in their “system.” I was assured this is a common issue due to them transitioning to a “new system.” They put in a request to their “backend team” and told me the second number should drop off within 72 hours. I was told to try signing in again in 3 days to confirm the phantom number is gone.

Well, I forgot. But I remembered today when signing in and realizing that second number - which I don’t have access to and isn’t on my Discover profile - is still showing up as a 2FA option.

I called Discover again. Like last time, they confirmed this is a known issue and again checked my account to confirm this phantom number isn’t present on my profile. Next, they recommended I speak with “web support” and this is where things took a crazy turn. I learned:

1. Discover HQ is aware and this is still a “known issue."

2. Discover doesn’t know where this additional number is coming from because they transitioned to getting phone numbers from a third party data broker and apparently, decided to use those numbers for 2FA.

3. Discover can’t tell me which specific data broker they’re using.

4. Discover doesn’t know when this will be fixed or when customers will be able to remove invalid 2FA phone numbers from their accounts.

5. There will be no communication given to customers if and when this is fixed. You'll have to call back on your own at some point in the future.

This seems absolutely insane. How is this huge security risk ongoing for over a month? Does anyone on HN use Discover? Can you confirm if you’re also seeing random/old/unrecognized phone numbers presented as options for SMS 2FA?

Related Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/discover/comments/1r41m95/no_way_to_remove_old_numbers_for_2fa/
by n89nanda | 2026-03-01 23:13:13+00:00
I built speedmux to make parallel agent workflows manageable from one terminal interface.

At a high level, the architecture is:

1. one terminal multiplexer process managing multiple concurrent sessions
2. per-session isolation so each agent/task can run independently
3. a persistent sidebar that tracks session state/activity without switching context
4. rendering/performance path powered by libghostty, which keeps interaction latency low even with multiple active sessions

It’s written in Go, and a lot of it was vibe-coded with Codex.
by csense | 2026-03-01 23:13:19+00:00
An AI agent is doing some actions. Those actions must comply with "controls" like 'ALLOW transfer ON treasury WHERE amount <= 10000 AND currency = "USDC"' and provide public, auditable proof that actions complied with the spec. The action log seems to be verifiable via ZK proofs.

What's the application here? If you want to enforce that an agent's blockchain transactions follow some deterministic conditions, why not just give it access to a command-line tool (MCP / skill / whatever) that enforces your conditions?

If you want auditing of the agent's blockchain actions to be public, why not just make all your agent's actions go through an ordinary smart contract?

I don't mean to kill your enthusiasm for programming or AI. But this project...I'm sorry, but this project just isn't good. It's an over-engineered, vibe-coded "solution" in search of a problem.

This project is about a month old. I highly doubt one person produced 134 kloc in that time. I'm pretty sure a lot of it is vendorized dependencies and AI-generated code that's had minimal human review. Much of the documentation appears to be AI-generated as well.
by Aurornis | 2026-03-01 23:14:07+00:00
As someone who has spent a lot of time riding both bicycles and motorized things, this is not true at all.

I could hop my bicycle over curbs that would bring a police motorcycle to a halt, or even toss a bike over a fence and then pick it up on the other side if I wanted. Or I could dip into the trees near the bike path where a police motorcycle has no chance of maneuvering.
by Noaidi | 2026-03-01 23:14:17+00:00
"Thus the wave function can’t tell us what the quantum system is like before we measure it. "

Nothing is a particle, all measured things are a probability that we make a certainty when we measure them.

When you stop looking at things as things, but instead, see them as probabilities, it will all make sense. My hand and the beer bottle I pick up are both probabilities. Since the mind cannot navigate the world based on probabilities it turns them into certainties.

Physical science is is the only way we can perceive quantum science. There is no "collapse" outside of our brains perception.
by FEELmyAGI | 2026-03-01 23:14:44+00:00
If we're talking about goalposts, lets also recognize the Motte and Bailey of initial claims of "20 years professional software engineer actually good password manager" to "hee hee toy project testing how LLms work not complete not even for personal not recmmond for others"

I don't think your password manager is good, and I don't think you think it's good either or you'd be using it.

I'm not trolling. It's way cheaper and faster to just clone an existing project if you want to mess around with making a password manager suit your taste.
by aeternum | 2026-03-01 23:14:45+00:00
A throttle is excellent on an e-bike especially for city riding. It is far easier to move at slow speeds by applying a small amount of throttle vs. trying to torque the pedals just the right amount, if behind someone or near pedestrians.

Many e-bikes don't have torque sensors and instead use a cheap rotation sensor so the motor engages almost randomly at certain points in pedal rotation when moving at slow speed.
by jacquesm | 2026-03-01 23:14:53+00:00
That's why you don't touch Lithium Ion packs unless you know what you are doing. I've repaired many Bosch packs before I tried building my own and seeing the guts of professionally designed and robotically assembled packs after they're a few years old is a very sobering exercise in what to do and what definitely not to do.

There are a bunch of youtubers that go out of their way to give massively dangerous advice to people and I always wonder what their liability situation is.