MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Kaadz | 2026-02-08 12:34:15+00:00
Hey HN, I'm 16 and built this after an agent loop cost me $500.
WatchLLM auto-terminates agents when they hit cost limits and alerts you in real-time via Slack/Discord. Also has semantic caching (70% savings) and streaming response caching (industry first).
Built-in agent debugger shows you exactly where loops happen.
Just launched cost kill switch + real-time alerts this week.

Would love feedback from the HN community!
by Der_Einzige | 2026-02-08 12:36:06+00:00
Our paper on removing AI slop got accepted to ICLR 2026, and it's under consideration for an IgNobel prize:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061

Our definition of slop (repetitive characteristic language from LLMs) is the original one as articulated by the LLM creative writing community circa 2022-2023. Folks trying to redefine it today to mean "lazy LLM outputs I don't like" should have chosen a different word.
by VenturingVole | 2026-02-08 12:36:12+00:00
Strongly inclined to agree here: Having recently joined a small applied AI startup and we were discussing the need for E2E tests. My initial gut reaction (which I kept quiet) was that such things turn into unmaintainable messes which delay releases and increasingly reduce in value.

I recognised this was grounded in an entirely different world of software engineering and organisation size though. I followed a path of thinking about what went wrong historically and how might they be solved: Better structure, discipline, resources - all of the things which agentic AI facilitates.

You are right about most skipping this part: But I view it as being like a sewerage and sanitation system - largely invisible and not thought about but critical for long-term health.

Also this ties in very nicely with Netflix's approach to Chaos Engineering and enabling it at broader scale.
by KronisLV | 2026-02-08 12:37:02+00:00
I kinda like the idea, decreasing the friction of doing things yourself to near 0.

I recently migrated from my YOURLS install to just having an Apache2 config with some scripts to append to it: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/sometimes-dropbox-is-just-ftp-b...

Sometimes you don't need "serious" bullshit like Spring Boot either but something more minimalist is more than enough. Though I think it can only work well when you have enough usable primitives, e.g. I've written software in Go that has minimal dependencies and it only worked so well thanks to both the language being relatively simple AND also having a really strong standard library.

The moment when someone tries to write a web server from scratch in a collaborative environment (e.g. project at work with deadlines), I'm peacing the fuck out of there. And in my experience, trying to make design systems or frameworks from scratch leads to a pretty bad mess, because people miss all sorts of inherent complexity until it comes around to bite them later.

I guess what I'm saying is that there's quite the difference between what you do for your own projects, vs what is most likely to lead to long term success in a group setting, especially in 1-2 pizza teams - evaluate the benefits vs risks when considering using vs building.

I'm also a bit blind to this when it comes to certain things, look at this funny video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40SnEd1RWUU I would still prefer to use self-hostable software so I know more of the stack and have control and possibly some cost savings vs someone who'd just fork over a bunch of cash to a SaaS / PaaS vendor.
by AlexeyBrin | 2026-02-08 12:37:22+00:00
> You certainly can get identical results, but it's equally certainly not going to be that simple a path frequently.

But at least I know that if I need to, I can do it. With an LLM, if you don't store the original weights, all bets are off. Reproducibility of results can be a hard requirement in certain cases or industries.
by pydry | 2026-02-08 12:38:09+00:00
>We stand on the brink of a world where some wealthy people will get more wealthy, but very many will struggle without work or prospects.

Brink? This has been the reality for decades now.

>A society where a large percent have no income is unsustainable in the short term, and ultimately liable to turn to violence. I can see it ending badly. Trouble who in power is willing to stop it?

Nobody. They will try to channel it.

I think all signals are pretty inevitably pointing to three potential outcomes (in order of likelihood): WW3, soviet style collapse of the west or a soviet style collapse of the sino-russian bloc.

If the promise of AI is real I think it makes WW3 a much more likely outcome - a "freed up" disaffected workforce pining for meaning and a revolutionized AI-drone first battlefield both tip the scales in favor of world war.
by Aachen | 2026-02-08 12:38:34+00:00
Good to know there's reply bots out there that copy out content immediately. I rarely run into edit conflicts (where someone reads before I add in another thing) but it happens, maybe this is why. Sorry for that

Besides the "what does pki mean" discussion, as for who "misses the point" here, consider that both sides in a discussion have a chance at having missed the original point of a reply (it's not always only about how the world is / what the signing keys are, but how the world should be / whose keys should control a device). But the previous post was already in such a tone that it really doesn't matter who's right, it's not a discussion worth having anymore
by zadnan2002 | 2026-02-08 12:38:37+00:00
The async AI + sync approval bottleneck is real. One thing that helped me: stop being physically desk-bound during those wait times.

I built ForkOff to solve this - when Claude needs approval, push notification to your phone, one-tap approve from anywhere. Turns out you don't actually need to be at your desk for most approvals.

The fast mode helps with speed, but even faster is letting the AI work while you're literally anywhere else. Early access: forkoff.app

(And yes, the pricing for fast mode is wild - $100 burned in 2 hours per some comments here!)
by hdgvhicv | 2026-02-08 12:39:09+00:00
Massive implications from that

A magic unobtainium drive which works in a consistent way is fine, just call it “hyperspace” or whatever

There’s a difference between hard sci-fi and soft sci-fi, but they are both still sci-fi, you can tell optimistic stories of the future with a “battle drive”, as long as you keep it consistent. If the drive cancels relativity effects and allows travel at 5000c that’s fine. Just ensure you travel at 5000c, no hoping across the galaxy in a few days, but travelling to another star in a few days or even hours is fine.
by Havoc | 2026-02-08 12:39:35+00:00
The slop is sad but a mild irritation at most.

It's the societal level impact of recent advances that I'd call "terrifying". There is a non-zero chance we end up with a "useless" class that can't compete against AI & machines - like at all, on any metric. And there doesn't seem to be much of a game plan for dealing with that without social fabric tearing
by simonw | 2026-02-08 12:39:58+00:00
I think that's bad judgement on your part.

If you want hype go see what most of the AI influencers on Twitter and LinkedIn talk about.

If you can't see the difference between that and what I write about then I question your reading comprehension skills.

(Looks like you've posted 16 comments on HN since you created your account and 3 of them were critical of me. I gotta learn not to feed the trolls.)
by Tade0 | 2026-02-08 12:40:02+00:00
Same. I hit Tab a lot because even though the system doesn't actually understand what it's doing, it's really good at following patterns. Takes off the mental load of checking syntax.

Occasionally of course it's way off, in which case I have to tell it to stfu ("snooze").

Also it's great at presenting someone else's knowledge, as it doesn't actually know facts - just what token should come after a sequence of others. The other day I just pasted an error message from a system that I wasn't familiar with and it explained in detail what the problem was and how to solve it - brilliant, just what I wanted.
by bko | 2026-02-08 12:40:36+00:00
Is it really a bubble? The AI boom is often compared to dot com bubble but was that a bubble? Sure if you bought immediately before the crash and sold after you lost a lot of money. But if you were just consistently investing in web based companies from lates 1990s to 2010, how did you do? Probably pretty well. Web did change the world and create an immense amount of wealth in the world and markets. You're just focused on a short time frame.

Even the real estate bubble in 2008. If you bought a home in 2005 and sold in 2009, sure you lost a lot, but if you just invested in real estate from mid 2000s and kept it for 10 years, you prob did pretty well. Even the great depression had a sharp readjustment, but look at pretty much any 10‑year windows, including great depression, you'll see ~10% nominal and ~5–7% real annualized equity returns.

I think AI will be similar. It's a paradigm shift. Some of todays companies will go under and stocks will crash but over 10+ years, I think it will be a great investment and the industry will flourish, much like the tech or real estate bubble.
by davexunit | 2026-02-08 12:41:56+00:00
Guile, being a bytecode VM with JIT currently, loses to Chez/Racket overall but it's honestly quite fast. I can make games that run at a smooth 60fps with infrequent GC pauses. Plenty of room to grow but Guile isn't slow by any means. I've never been a Gauche user but Guile has lots of nice libraries these days.
by raphinou | 2026-02-08 12:41:57+00:00
I've been happily using a container to run my agents [1]. I tried to make it evolve with more advanced features, but it quickly became harder to use and I went back to a basic container which I just start with a run.sh script. Is a similar simple use possible with matchlock?

1:https://github.com/asfaload/agents_container
by heavyset_go | 2026-02-08 12:41:57+00:00
> People used to think detailed drawing and realistic painting were kinds of unachievable wizardry. Now they go on ChatGPT or Midjourney and press a button. Professionals despair at the slop results, but they’re good enough for most people.

Anyone who would actually pay for a portrait would not hang Midjourney or ChatGPT output on their walls.
by hdgvhicv | 2026-02-08 12:42:36+00:00
Start trek transporters work because of a Heisenberg compensator. Great, no idea how it could possible work but it’s enough to know it does.

The typical poorly received uses aren’t when the cre beams down from orbit, or even when they can’t beam down, it’s when they de age people and retrieve their pattern from the buffer to cure an illness, and never do it again, or when they beam light years away for a throw away story element.
by kristopolous | 2026-02-08 12:42:48+00:00
I was trying to get a hold of him for years. People who knew him kept saying they'd get me in touch, never did.

His name pops up a lot during the 60s and 70s as an author on numerous articles about networks, often regarding many competing, now defunct alternative networks to the Internet.

Examples of scans I personally made: https://siliconfolklore.com/internet-history/farber-datamati... and https://siliconfolklore.com/internet-history/farber-datamati...
by cthalupa | 2026-02-08 12:42:52+00:00
Compounding pharmacies are in many ways just a continuation of the original apothecaries and pharmacies, and the US is hardly the only country with the legal framework that allows this.

Australia was basically a carbon copy of the US in this regard until 2024, but they have specifically started targeting a lot of the "wellness" compounding that includes peptides, GLP-1s, etc. since then.

Germany has two classes of pharmacy that are nearly the exact same as 503A and 503B compounders in the US

Canada is similar but stricter about the big pharmacies turning into de facto manufacturers, pumping out huge quantities for downstream compounders and clinics, which is what happened in the US.

Lots of other countries that you might not consider "proper countries" (whatever that means) follow a very similar system to the US, and lots of countries that allow some form of compounding, like the UK through their "specials" program, but it's much more centralized - basically cutting out the 503A compounders in the US.

Fundamentally compounding pharmacies offer pretty important services - there are people out there that would literally not be able to take the most effective medication for their condition without the compounding pharmacies making formulation changes that the larger manufacturers might not have incentive to make. Their existence quite literally saves lives. So it becomes a matter of not making that so restrictive that you wind up killing people due to restricted access vs. letting it get abused in situations like we're seeing today with tirzepatide and semaglutide.
by Der_Einzige | 2026-02-08 12:42:55+00:00
Pathetic how they have no support for modifying sampling settings, or even a "logit_bias" so I can ban my claude from using the EM dash (and regular dash), semicolons, or "not". Also will upweight things like exclamation points

Clearly those whose job it is to "monitor" folks use this as their "tell" if someone AI generated something. That's why every major LLM has this particular slop profile. It's infuriating.

I wrote a long winded rant about this bullshit

https://gist.github.com/Hellisotherpeople/71ba712f9f899adcb0...
by throwup238 | 2026-02-08 12:44:16+00:00
> You are right about most skipping this part: But I view it as being like a sewerage and sanitation system - largely invisible and not thought about but critical for long-term health.

And like sewage and sanitation the infrastructure is a lot more complicated than people think.

I’m curious what happens when they need to make a DRU of Stripe or another payment processor.
Show HN: WLM-SLP – A 0D-27D Structural Language for Multi-Agent Alignment
by WujieGuGavin | 2026-02-08 12:45:23+00:00
Hi HN,
I’m releasing WLM (Wujie Language Model) — a structural language for AI that treats meaning as geometry, tension, and boundary instead of tokens, narrative, or emotion.
This release includes the Shadow Layer v1.1, a fully public, non‑executing architectural description of WLM. It exposes the dimensional structure and reasoning framework without revealing any protocol‑level execution logic.
What WLM is
WLM is not a model, dataset, or training method.
It is a high‑dimensional structural protocol for:
- reasoning
- world modeling
- subject/world separation
- boundary formation
- dimensional alignment
It defines how meaning stabilizes across 0D–27D structural layers.
What’s included in this release
This release contains the public half of WLM:
- Shadow Layer v1.1
The complete architectural outline of WLM.
Non‑executing, safe, and version‑frozen.
- 0–27D Dimensional Physics
A separate repository describing the generative physics of structure:
how worlds appear, how subjects stabilize, and how meaning emerges.
Why release this
The goal is to provide:
- a transparent structural reference
- a stable interface for research
- a shared language for high‑dimensional reasoning
- a foundation for alignment work that doesn’t rely on behavioral heuristics
This is not a teaser or partial disclosure.
It is the full public architecture.
Links
Shadow Layer v1.1:
https://github.com/gavingu2255-ai/WLM-Open-Source/blob/main/...
Dimensional Physics (0–27D):
https://github.com/gavingu2255-ai/WLM-Paradox-Dimensional-Ph...
Happy to answer technical questions about the architecture, dimensional stack, or structural reasoning model.
by rblalock | 2026-02-08 12:45:27+00:00
Full stack agents, (Bun, TypeScript, Hono, etc), services like Sandboxes, postgres dbs, redis, storage, observability, evals, down to our own ipv6 overlay network, and hybrid/on-prem features as well.

Video and info here:

https://agentuity.com/blog/agentuity-v1-is-here
by specialist | 2026-02-08 12:45:38+00:00
Hi Brendan. Thanks for the update. Ignore the haters.

WRT "AI saving the planet", obviously.

We need ungodly amounts of machine learning. Weather modeling, forecasting, resilience planning, risk mgmt, planning, etc.

To implement virtual power plants (aka P2P distributed grid), everything needs to get smart. Just this transformation alone is a generational project.

There's dozens more of "must have" stacks we need to tackle climate crisis. Replace industrial heat. Decarbonize agriculture. Build out geothermal. Find and stop methane leaks. Pretty much everything needs a makeover, really.

OpenAI is as good a place (for you) to start as any.

Happy hunting.
by clejack | 2026-02-08 12:45:48+00:00
So what you're saying is the laws of thermodynamics that I learned in school don't apply to biological systems?

I'm admittedly in no position to argue deeply about biology, or even physics for that matter, because I studied mechanical engineering. I dealt with physics in an applied manner.

With that said, this story comes to mind:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Barbieri

It seems to disagree with your idea that fat is not fuel. And the first law of Thermo seemed to be applying to this man. He had little to no energy input (via food) and a baseline energy expenditure from just existing, so his system burned stored energy via body fat.
by jingkai_he | 2026-02-08 12:46:00+00:00
Creator here. A few key differences:

1. from isolation pov, Matchlock launch Firecracker microvm with its own kernel, so you get hardware-level isolation rather than bubblewrap's seccomp/namespace approach, therefore a sandbox escape would require a VM breakout.

2. Matchlock intercepts and controls all network traffic by default, with deny-all networking and domain allowlisting. Bubblewrap doesn't provide this, which is how exfiltration attacks like the one recently demonstrated against Claude co-work (https://www.promptarmor.com/resources/claude-cowork-exfiltra...).

3. You can use any Docker/OCI image and even build one, so the dev experience is seamless if you are using docker-container-ish dev workflow.

4. The sandboxes are programmable, as Matchlock exposes a JSON-RPC-based SDK (Go and Python) for launching and controlling VMs programmatically, which gives you finer-grained control for more complex use cases.
by mhb | 2026-02-08 12:46:00+00:00
Drug companies produce drugs to make money. There is a huge investment. They maximize revenue by price discrimination to recover the cost of the good drug and all the drugs that didn't work. The US is a rich country. People in other countries can't pay as much for the drug. To maximize revenue the drug company sells the drug at a lower price to those people.

More generally, price controls lead to less supply. Drug price controls will result in fewer new drugs. Minimum wage laws result in no workers doing work that is worth less than minimum wage. Anti- price gouging laws result in less bottled water and fewer generators after a hurricane. The principle is universal despite promises of delightful state run grocery stores.

Praise for price-gouging:
https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/praise-for-price-gouging
by throwup238 | 2026-02-08 12:48:39+00:00
> The tradeoff is LLMs still struggle to produce good idiomatic Rust consistently so it takes more iteration cycles to get there (good agent tooling helps, linting/checks/etc.) The compile times on those iterations can be brutal sometimes depending on the project size which adds up for sure. The crafty agents can still find ways to satisfy the compiler without actually solving the problem correctly too, so the cheating risk of course doesn't fully go away.

I’ve gone ahead and completely banned ‘unwrap_or_default’ and a bunch of other helpful functions because LLMs just cannot be trusted to use them properly.
by manuelabeledo | 2026-02-08 12:49:42+00:00
For a single execution, to a certain extent, yes.

But that’s not the point I’m trying to make here. JIT compilers are vastly more predictable than LLMs. I can take any two JVMs from any two vendors, and over several versions and years, I’m confident that they will produce the same outputs given the same inputs, to a certain degree, where the input is not only code but GC, libraries, etc.

I cannot do the same with two versions of the same LLM offering from a single vendor, that had been released one year apart.
Ask HN: Would you use an ESLint-like tool for SEO that fails your CI/CD build?
by YannBuilds | 2026-02-08 12:51:37+00:00
I’m building Indxel — an open-source SEO infrastructure for developers (npm package + CLI + MCP server for AI agents).
The core idea: SEO breaks silently. You delete a page, rename a route, forget an og:image — nothing tells you. Your traffic drops weeks later and you have no idea why.
Indxel treats SEO like code quality. npx indxel check runs 15 validation rules against your pages (meta tags, Open Graph, structured data, canonical URLs, etc.) and gives you a score. npx indxel check --ci fails your build if something’s broken.
It also crawls your live site, checks your sitemap against actual pages, verifies that referenced assets (og:image, favicon) actually return 200, and does keyword research via Google Autocomplete — all from the terminal.
The MCP server exposes all of this to AI agents (Claude, Cursor) so they can audit SEO while working on your code.
Stack: TypeScript SDK, Commander CLI, MCP protocol. MIT licensed.
My question: is this a real pain point for you, or do you just fix SEO manually when you notice it? Would CI/CD integration change your workflow?
by ch_123 | 2026-02-08 12:53:36+00:00
The VT1xx keyboards used linear switches, you may want to look at modern mechanical keyboards with linear switches as a rough approximation. Having tried typing on one in a museum, I recall the VT1xx as relatively scratchy compared with more modern keyboards, although that could have been a wear and tear issue.

The keyboards of the VT2xx/3xx series are awful, and the later ones had rubber dome keyboards which are among the nicer rubber dome keyboards I've tried. I own both a VT320 and VT420, and managed to get a new old stock keyboard for each.
by bizzleDawg | 2026-02-08 12:53:54+00:00
My (and many others) normal workflow includes a planning phase, followed by an implementation phase. For me the most useful time for fast mode would be during that planning phase.

The current "clear context and execute plan" would be great to be joined by a, "clear context, switch to regular speed mode, and execute plan".

I even think I would not require fast mode for the explore agents etc - they have so much to do that I accept that takes a while. being able to rapidly iterate on the plan before setting it going would make it easier.

Please and thank you, Boris.
by 9dev | 2026-02-08 12:54:21+00:00
If your answer to that problem is less women should attain higher education and take care of raising children instead, we just fundamentally disagree. Women have an equal right to education and working as men do.

The charts you refer to show an environment where the responsibility for care work is heavily skewed to the detriment of women. If men took up a bigger part of raising children, it would be easier for couples to do that. But the vast majority of men don't.
by f1shy | 2026-02-08 12:55:33+00:00
In fact it is. And can be useful. IF you have quality controls in place, so the code has a reasonable quality, the LOC will correlate with amount of functionality and/or complexity. Is a good metric? No. Can be used just like that to compare arbitrary code bases, absolutely no!

As a seasoned manager, I have an idea how long a feature should take, both in implementing effort and longness of code. I hace to know it, is my everyday work.
by mark_l_watson | 2026-02-08 12:55:45+00:00
Interesting perspective of someone curating an exhibit for their famous mother. I am a fan of her writing, but strangely I most often go back to Le Guin’s audio book reading of ‘Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching’ with short musical interludes and small sound effects. 100% satisfying to listen to.