MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by forgotpwd16 | 2026-01-20 15:02:43+00:00
>Managing agents, crafting skills, building docs, designing workflows

You're describing the modern edition of people obsessed with their "development" environments. The ones who treated their system (usually Linux) and text editor (usually Vim or Emacs) like a canvas, perfecting their configuration the way an artist refines a masterwork. Choosing packages and themes like a painter choosing brushes. Younger people of this mindset are now obsessed with multiple LLMs, multi-agent workflows, MCPs, and similar.

In contrast, there's the modern version of the people who used to just open an IDE and copy-paste snippets until they got the result they wanted. Now, those same people simply open Claude Code and prompt: "make me this app", "modify this", "do this more like that", and so on. Those are vibe coders. The only thing that's changed is a lower barrier, less effort, and faster development; yet somehow higher quality since SOTA LLMs output better code than most juniors used to.

And last there's the midway. People who set up their environment, without it becoming the main focus.
by jonathanlydall | 2026-01-20 15:02:51+00:00
In 2009 when South African IT communication was essentially only permitted through a single entity, as a publicity stunt a small ISP did an implementation of this:

https://pigeonrace2009.co.za/

As I recall at the time, the best consumer speeds available were 512kbps with a 3GB per month cap at today’s cost of about 45USD.

The worst part (especially as a WoW player) is that QoS was applied giving priority to ports 80, 443, 110 and 25. This resulted in all other ports having terrible latency, probably added 150ms on top of the unavoidable (due to speed of light) 190ms to get to European servers.

Fortunately today the situation is much better, there are numerous FNO companies and even more numerous ISPs for each.

I pay about 45 USD for an uncapped 100Mbps connection.
Show HN: NetUtil – I Rebuilt Apple's Network Utility Using Claude Code
by ahampt | 2026-01-20 15:02:57+00:00
Apple removed Network Utility from macOS a few years back. I figured rebuilding it would be a good way to see what Claude Code could do on a real project and it would give me a chance to learn about the Apple dev ecosystem.

I'm primarily a web dev (Django/Python, JavaScript, Go) with minimal Swift experience. Claude Code wrote the code. I steered and debugged.

What I learned: notarization, code signing, Sparkle for auto-updates, Xcode configuration. That stuff took longer than the features.

What I didn't learn: Swift and SwiftUI. I can read it enough to spot problems, but I couldn't write this app myself. Not sure how I feel about that.

The app is straightforward: ping, traceroute, DNS lookup, netstat, whois, port scan. Free, no ads. Also used Claude Code for the Hugo/Tailwind marketing site and generate the SEO slop articles.

I used Gemini Nano Banana Pro to create the app icon. I took the screenshots myself. Hard work.

https://www.netutil.app

Happy to answer questions about the process.
Show HN: AxonFlow, governing LLM and agent workflows
by saurabhjain1592 | 2026-01-20 15:03:05+00:00
Hi HN, we’re building AxonFlow for teams running LLMs or agents in real production systems.

Once agent workflows move past demos, failures are rarely model issues. They tend to show up as execution problems during real runs.

Short 2-minute technical demo showing execution control and auditability in practice:
https://youtu.be/FNgnESo9RtI

AxonFlow is a self-hosted, source-available (BSL 1.1) control plane that sits inline in the execution path and governs LLM calls, tool calls, retries, approvals, and policy enforcement step by step. It does not replace your orchestrator and can run alongside LangChain, CrewAI, or custom systems.

The problems we focus on are usually discovered only after going to production:
- retries that accidentally repeat side effects
- partial failures mid-workflow
- permissions that differ per step
- limited ability to inspect or intervene during execution

This is not aimed at early demos or hobby projects. It’s for teams already operating under real production constraints.

GitHub:
https://github.com/getaxonflow/axonflow

Docs:
https://docs.getaxonflow.com

I’d value feedback from folks running LLM or agent workflows in production.
by bg2d | 2026-01-20 15:03:28+00:00
I've been thinking about prompt injection lately, and it's honestly terrifying how vulnerable LLM applications are. The core problem is simple: these models can't reliably tell the difference between your instructions and user data. It's like having a computer that treats everything as executable code.
We've tried the usual defenses—input filtering, fancy prompt engineering, detection systems—but they're all probabilistic. Nothing provides real guarantees.
This reminded me of buffer overflow attacks from decades ago. The solution there was the NX bit: hardware that literally prevents data regions from being executed. Could we do something similar for LLMs?
Turns out, maybe. There's promising research on "Structured Queries" that uses special delimiter tokens to separate trusted instructions from untrusted data, with models trained to respect that boundary. It's not perfect—it's probabilistic, not deterministic—but it significantly raises the bar.
by dv_dt | 2026-01-20 15:03:39+00:00
They say history repeats itself, but there is a remarkable parallel on US industrial quality experts and statisticians being ignored by the US auto industry in the 1970s, then being taken seriously by the Japanese auto makers who then sling shotted themselves past US auto quality in the 80s to probably 2010ish?

In this round of history repeating, 2020s US car maker management was also actively anti-collaboration and anti-expert within it's own domain. You can see commentary by Sandy Munro on US companies ignoring design and production efficiency details - outsourcing too much of their own supply chain, and being resistant to integration improvements. And similar occurrences of Chinese auto companies hiring US auto production experts who were being ignored by the US auto industry, then going on to to improve fit, finish and quality, while building organizations unafraid of vertical integration.
by bluGill | 2026-01-20 15:03:58+00:00
I have a lot of ICEs - they are collectors items I keep in the shed unless there is a parade. My EVs are the daily drivers, not as fun, but more practical.

The above isn't quite true - there are some "daily" ICEs yet because EVs aren't in all niches and I don't replace things instantly even if they were. The idea is the future that is coming closer and closer to reality.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2026-01-20 15:04:08+00:00
I have learned to do that, but it actually makes me uncomfortable to do it.

I'm "on the spectrum," which, in my case, manifests as not being very comfortable, when people give me attention. That's why I like working on "infrastructure" stuff (and also why I used to be a bass player[0]).

[0] https://cmarshall.com/MulletMan.jpg (That hair was in style, back then. I no longer look like that).
Show HN: SolScript – Write Solidity, compile to Solana programs
by ticktockten | 2026-01-20 15:04:37+00:00
Hey HN,

I built SolScript, a compiler that lets you write smart contracts in Solidity syntax and deploy them to Solana.

The problem: Solana has mass dev interest (17k+ active developers in 2025), but the Rust learning curve remains a 3-6 month barrier. Anchor helps, but you still need to grok ownership, lifetimes, and borrowing. Meanwhile, there are 30k+ Solidity developers who already know how to write smart contracts.

SolScript bridges that gap. You write this:

contract Token {
mapping(address => uint256) public balanceOf;

function transfer(address to, uint256 amount) public {
balanceOf[msg.sender] -= amount;
balanceOf[to] += amount;
emit Transfer(msg.sender, to, amount);
}
}

And it compiles to a native Solana program with automatic PDA derivation, account validation, and full Anchor compatibility.

How it works:

- Parser turns Solidity-like source into an AST
- Type checker validates and annotates
- Two codegen backends: (1) Anchor/Rust output that goes through cargo build-sbf, or (2) direct LLVM-to-BPF compilation
- Mappings become PDAs automatically, account structs are derived from your type system

What's supported:

- State variables, structs, arrays, nested mappings
- Events and custom errors
- Modifiers (inlined)
- Cross-program invocation (CPI)
- SPL Token operations
- msg.sender, block.timestamp equivalents

Current limitations:

- No msg.value for incoming SOL (use wrapped SOL or explicit transfers)
- No Token 2022 support yet (planned for v0.4)
- Modifiers are inlined, so keep them small

The output is standard Anchor/Rust code. You can eject anytime and continue in pure Rust. It's a launchpad, not a lock-in.

Written in Rust. Ships with a VS Code extension (LSP, syntax highlighting, go-to-definition, autocomplete).

Install: cargo install solscript-cli

Repo: https://github.com/cryptuon/solscript

I'd love feedback on the language design, the compilation approach, or use cases I haven't thought of. Happy to answer questions about the internals.
by sirwhinesalot | 2026-01-20 15:05:37+00:00
The only approach I've tried that seems to work reasonably well, and consistently, was the following:

Make a commit.

Give Claude a task that's not particularly open ended, the closer to pure "monkey work" boilerplate nonsense the task is, the better (which is also the sort of code I don't want do deal with myself).

Preferably it should be something that only touches a file or two in the codebase unless it is a trivial refactor (like changing the same method call all over the place)

Make sure it is set to planning mode and let it come up with a plan.

Review the plan.

Let it implement the plan.

If it works, great, move on to review. I've seen it one-shot some pretty annoying tasks like porting code from one platform to another.

If there are obvious mistakes (program doesn't build, tests don't pass, etc.) then a few more iterations usually fix the issue.

If there are subtle mistakes, make a branch and have it try again. If it fails, then this is beyond what it can do, abort the branch and solve the issue myself.

Review and cleanup the code it wrote, it's usually a lot messier than it needs to be. This also allows me to take ownership of the code. I now know what it does and how it works.

I don't bother giving it guidelines or guardrails or anything of the sort, it can't follow them reliably. Even something as simple as "This project uses CMake, build it like this" was repeatedly ignored as it kept trying to invoke the makefile directly and in the wrong folder.

This doesn't save me all that much time since the review and cleanup can take long, but it serves a great unblocker.

I also use it as a rubber duck that can talk back and documentation source. It's pretty good for that.

This idea of having an army of agents all working together on the codebase is hilarious to me. Replace "agents" with "juniors I hired on fiverr with anterograde amnesia" and it's about how well it goes.
by msejas | 2026-01-20 15:06:17+00:00
I have gotten to the point where people selling the idea of running 20 agents at the time and delivering something useful are firmly planted on the left of the Dunning-Kruger curve and are unable to have a critical take on the code being produced.

I review every single AI edit with the same cognitive load as if I was programming myself (Claude Code Opus 4.5) and I'm always having to adjust and fix things on a constant basis.

I keep doing it because having the LLM output is basically like a giant auto complete I can tweak, I can't compete with the speed of a proposed patch of me hand writing everything even if I'm considered 'fast' at a 90 WPM and using vim keybindings.

There has never been once a single session or non-trivial task where I would have to NOT intervene in the implementation and I consider myself a quite strong power user, (Master's in AI) using it for a long time, strong linting, and demanding test coverage.

It boggles me and I stand in disbelief with people saying they just let it run by itself and works (fulfilling all edge cases needed for production code NOT the happy path in a PoC) , has not been my experience at all.

I predict the following 3 things:

1.) The people using autonomous agents don't deploy any of the vibe coded mess in a high stakes production environment where bugs and crashes and unintended behaviours will make you lose money and reputation.

2) The people churning 20 agents non stop don't have the skill to realize the slop and mishaps of the code they are pushing.

3) These people have far better prompting skills and stronger setups than me and they can achieve better and more reliable results.

I don't know what it is, probably the third, but it has not matched my reality at all.
by kace91 | 2026-01-20 15:06:46+00:00
>you discover that there's a heap of functionality and convenience you'll have to let go,

Cloud storage of pictures is not an issue as I do regular backups (we all should, we’re a false positive account termination away from crying otherwise).

What’s else is there? I’m not American so no iMessage, I struggle to find some other blocker.
by Strongbad536 | 2026-01-20 15:06:49+00:00
i've low-key been running claude in dangerously skip permissions mode for at least like 4 months now and have yet to be bitten by a truly destructive action. YMMV but i think as long as you're guiding/prompting correctly, and don't just allow write access to your prod account DBs willy nilly, it's mostly fine. just keep an eye on it :shrug:
Tell HN: Use news.ycombinator.com/active
by lysace | 2026-01-20 15:07:24+00:00
news.ycombinator.com/news (the default redirect from the root) is being subjected to user-triggered censorship. There is a lot that these days.

Here's how I trained my desktop browser (Chrome) to visit the /active URL when when I type "ne<RET">

1. Type "news.ycombinator.com/active" into the Chrome combo box and hit return.

2. Type "ne" into the Chrome combo box.

3. In the list of completions, click on the cross/delete icon to the right for the first few that aren't what you want.

4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 until you get the desired result.
by opan | 2026-01-20 15:07:33+00:00
Rollbacks pretty much only work on LineageOS. I've seen this come up a lot in the last year as multiple F-Droid apps pushed out a bad update and people wanted a fix ASAP rather than in a couple weeks.

You can probably extract the apk of the old version on your other phone, btw.

http://7thzero.com/blog/extract-an-apk-from-android-devices-...
by fragmede | 2026-01-20 15:07:39+00:00
Until Claude nukes .git, assuming you're using git as the version/commit store. Solution use easy, just push to a remote on a reasonable cadence (that you can run reflog on, so a force push won't eat your data either). Git isn't backup though, it's a VCS, and those are two different things, even if they are somewhat alike.
by drw85 | 2026-01-20 15:07:48+00:00
> My claim is that they’re seeing something they want to exist and they’re making it exist and putting it out there, while the vast majority of haters aren’t exactly out there contributing to much of anything in terms of “real software engineering.”

Except that they didn't. They thought of something and then asked a tool to make it badly. I know it's hard to separate for a lot of people and it makes them feel like they made something. It's especially bad when that thing then has stuff on it like "Made with attention to accuracy" or some similar marketing claim when there is zero accuracy and a bunch of mistakes in there.

But me running the cmd to create the Hello World angular example does not mean i made anything.
Show HN: ConfigSift – browser-only diff/validate for .env, YAML, JSON
by gMan1 | 2026-01-20 15:08:00+00:00
Hello, I wanted to share ConfigSift, a client-side tool to compare configuration files (.env, YAML, JSON) before deployments.

You paste or drop two configs and it highlights what changed (including nested keys), with options to mask sensitive values. Everything runs locally in the browser—no uploads, no accounts.

Try it: https://configsift.com

I’d love feedback on what would make this most useful in real CI/CD workflows, and whether the UI makes diffs easy to review quickly.
by kernc | 2026-01-20 15:08:21+00:00
Since everyone tends to present their own solution, I bid you mine:

sandbox-run npx @anthropic-ai/claude-code

This runs npx (...) transparently inside a Bubblewrap sandbox, exposing only the $PWD. Contrary to many other solutions, it is a few lines of pure POSIX shell.

https://github.com/sandbox-utils/sandbox-run
by collinmcnulty | 2026-01-20 15:08:52+00:00
The “skill” line is what gamblers tell themselves to justify it. A much more useful demarcation is “does this game have any positive impact on the world” (entertainment value of the gambling itself doesn’t count). For example, insurance is not gambling even though it is itself a zero sum game, it enables societally beneficial risk taking. Options trading on real assets like stock aid in price discovery. Memecoins, sports betting, your local poker game and the way prediction markets actually function in practice are all gambling.
by jbrockwork | 2026-01-20 15:09:03+00:00
Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body
- Really cool account of human evolutionary history

Stolen Focus (Johann Hari)
- About how we've lost (and can regain) the ability to focus due to technological distraction (currently social media, etc. but hasn't always been)

Chip War
- History and geopolitical significance of the semiconductor industry
by afavour | 2026-01-20 15:09:14+00:00
I’ve heard coding agents best described as a fleet of junior developers available to you 24/7 and I think that’s about right. With the added downside that they don’t really learn as they go so they will forever be junior developers (until models get better).

There are projects where throwing a dozen junior developers at the problem can work but they’re very basic CRUD type things.
by linsomniac | 2026-01-20 15:09:20+00:00
>Anyone who claims AI is great is not building a large or complex enough app

I can't speak for everyone, but lots of us fully understand that the AI tooling has limitations and realize there's a LOT of work that can be done within those limitations. Also, those limitations are expanding, so it's good to experiment to find out where they are.

Conversely, it seems like a lot of people are saying that AI is worthless because it can't build arbitrarily large apps.

I've recently used the AI tooling to make a docusign-like service and it did a fairly good job of it, requiring about a days worth of my attention. That's not an amazingly complex app, but it's not nothing either. Ditto for a calorie tracking web app. Not the most complex app, but companies are making legit money off them, if you want a tangible measure of "worth".
by jermaustin1 | 2026-01-20 15:09:27+00:00
I've tried it. It can work. My prompt was "Use the gh commandline tool to get the issues for the current repository, and work on them in order, with bugs taking priority."

Elsewhere there are steps for how to develop: 1. Create new branch for the feature you are working on; 2. implement the feature fully, thinking hard when you need to (toolcall think(low, med, high) switches the reasoning level);

That said, it also failed a lot.
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-01-20 15:09:35+00:00
Since we are on this topic, how would I make an agent that does this job:

I am writing an automation software that interfaces with a legacy windows CAD program. Depending on the automation, I just need a picture of the part. Sometimes I need part thickness. Sometimes I need to delete parts. Etc... Its very much interacting with the CAD system and checking the CAD file or output for desired results.

I was considering something that would take screenshots and send it back for checks. Not sure what platforms can do this. I am stumped how Visual Studio works with this, there are a bunch of pieces like servers, agents, etc...

Even a how-to link would work for me. I imagine this would be extremely custom.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2026-01-20 15:10:42+00:00
There are some distinctions between gambling and prediction markets. For example, in prediction markets, some forms of insider trading are considered somewhat desirable - essentially, it monetizes insiders leaking inside information.

Other forms of insider trading can be problematic: What if someone (could be an individual or even an uncoordinated group) bets millions of dollars on you not doing X, in the hopes of you taking the opposite bet and doing X?

The most extreme that I've seen presented so far are markets where people can predict the death date of a person. On the surface, that just seems like a morbid bet. Once you consider the above form of insider trading, you realize that this can act as a reward for someone who can accurately predict the death date of said person, for example because they're making the counter-trade from a phone next to a high-powered rifle on the rooftop across the street - and like in the bribe example above, the people on the "losing" side of the bet might not mind too much. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market
by surgical_fire | 2026-01-20 15:10:42+00:00
> 100% definitely use antibiotics and hormones banned in europe for safety reasons

No it's not. South American meat, particularly from Argentina, Uruguay, and Southern Brazil is phenomenal. It's just the perfect geography and climate for cattle.

You are just crying for protectionism. If a less than 2% quota over the European production threatens you, it speaks more about your inability to do your job properly.
by spmurrayzzz | 2026-01-20 15:10:45+00:00
Preferences I think I get, but prejudices?

The OED defines prejudice as a "preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience."

My day to day work involves: full stack web dev, distributed systems, embedded systems, and machine learning. In addition to using AI tooling for dev tasks, we also use agents in production for various workflows and we also train/finetune models (some LLMs, but also other types of neural networks for anomaly detection, fault localization, time series forecasting, etc). I am basing my original commentary in this thread on all of that cumulative experience.

It has been my observation over the last almost 30 years of being a professional SWE that full stack web dev has been much easier and simpler than the other domains I work in. And even further, I find that models are much better at that domain on average than the other domains, measured by pass@k scores on private evals representing each domain. Anecdotal experience also tends to match the evals.

This tracks with all the other information we have pertaining to benchmark saturation, the "we need harder evals" crowd has been ringing this bell for the last 8-12 months. Models are getting very good at the less complex tasks.

I don't believe it will remain that way forever, but at present its far more common to see someone one shot a full stack web app from a single prompt than something like kernel driver for a NIC. One class of devs is seeing a massive performance jump, another class is not.

I don't see how that can be perceived as prejudice, it just may be an opinion you don't agree with or an observation that doesn't match your own experience (both of which are totally valid and understandable).