MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Acture MCP generates engineering reports from codebase and project data
by vkhafizov | 2026-02-05 15:37:49+00:00
Hi HN,

I built an open-source system that reads raw engineering data and produces a structured engineering report stored in Notion.

It’s designed for engineering managers, team leads, and stakeholders who need a clear, up-to-date view of project status without constant syncs or manual status reporting. The goal is to reduce meetings and status overhead by synthesizing progress reports directly from development artifacts.

The system runs as a local MCP server and can be connected to any MCP-compatible agent (it works especially well with Claude Desktop).

Inputs:
– diffs and commits
– pull requests
– tasks / issues
– documentation

Flow:
– an MCP server exposes project data as tools
– an agent (e.g., Claude Desktop) requests a report
– the system synthesizes a structured engineering report
– the report is stored as a Notion page
– the report can later be queried for explanations and follow-up questions

Available as an npm package: npm install -g acture-mcp
by bunderbunder | 2026-02-05 15:38:08+00:00
Fair. But I sure wish we could instead solve this problem the way we did 20 years ago: by not having Web search results be so choked off by SEO enshittification and slop that it’s hard to find good information anymore. Because, I promise you, “How do I do thing X in Excel?” did not used to be nearly so difficult a question to answer.
by HanClinto | 2026-02-05 15:38:27+00:00
It kinda' does, doesn't it?

Re: the "hobby" part is where I agree with you the most. Where you say it's not solving genuine problems is where I differ the most.

It really feels to me like Comma is staffed by people who recognize that they never stopped enjoying playing with Lego -- their bricks just grew up, and they realized they can:

1) solve real-world problems

2) not be jerks about it

3) get paid to do it

Not everything has to be about optimizing for #3.

I'm a happy paying customer of Comma.ai (Comma four, baby!) -- their product is awesome, extremely consumer-friendly, and I hope they can grow in their success!
by muchomuchach0 | 2026-02-05 15:38:43+00:00
I’m involved with this project.

A recurring issue in on-policy RL for LLMs is GPU under-utilization while actors wait for weight syncs from the learner. PipelineRL uses in-flight weight updates: actors keep sampling while the learner updates weights, which reduces policy lag without stalling the pipeline.

In practice this gives ~2× wall-clock speedups on large models.

A paper on the approach was recently accepted to TMLR and discusses policy-lag bounds in more detail.
by kevinkatzke | 2026-02-05 15:38:47+00:00
Feels like I’ve lived through a full infrastructure fashion cycle already. I started my career when cloud was the obvious answer and on-prem was “legacy.”

Now on-prem is cool again.

Makes me wonder whether we’re already setting up the next cycle 10 years from now, when everyone rediscovers why cloud was attractive in the first place and starts saying “on-prem is a bad idea” again.
by JasonADrury | 2026-02-05 15:39:02+00:00
From the warrant:

>While attempting to unlock the device by use of the compelled display of biometric characteristics pursuant to this warrant, law enforcement is not authorized to demand that an occupant state or otherwise provide the password or identify the specific biometric characteristics (including the unique fingers) or other physical features), that may be used to unlock or access the device(s). Nor does the warrant authorize law enforcement to use the fact that the warrant allows law enforcement to obtain the display of any biometric characteristics to compel an occupant to state or otherwise provide that information. However, the voluntary disclosure of such information by an occupant is permitted. To avoid confusion on that point, if agents in executing the warrant ask an occupant for the password to any device(s), or to identify which biometric characteristic (including the unique fingers) or other physical features) unlocks any device(s), the agents will not state or otherwise imply that the warrant requires the person to provide such information, and will make clear that providing any such information is voluntary and that the
person is free to refuse the request.
by threethirtytwo | 2026-02-05 15:39:10+00:00
>I don’t know how you came to that conclusion from my comment. I’m talking about a particular product named OpenClaw, representing a new style of doing work; not AI in general.

Right, I'm saying AI in general is an example of the unreliability of peoples experiences on openclaw. If people are so unreliable about the narrative of AI, I don't trust the narrative of openclaw which on this thread in particular is very negative and in stark contrast to the hype.

>I dropped $200 on Claude Max in my personal capacity to test OpenClaw because I use Opus 4.5 all day in Cursor on an enterprise subscription… because it works for those problems.

The comment wasn't directed at you personally. I'm just saying I want to see counter examples of openclaw succeeding, not just examples of it failing. Frankly on this thread there's Zero success stories which I find sort of strange.
by sanderjd | 2026-02-05 15:39:14+00:00
A tricky thing on this site is that there are lots of different people with very different kinds of experience, which often results in people talking past each other. A lot of people here have experience as zero-to-one early startup engineers, and yep, I share your experience that Heroku was very popular in that space. A lot of other people have experience at later growth and infrastructure focused startups, and they have totally different experiences. And other people have experience as SREs at big tech, or doing IT / infrastructure for non-tech fortune 500 businesses. All of these are very different experiences, and very different things have been popular over the last couple decades depending on which kind of experience you have.
by chrisjj | 2026-02-05 15:39:31+00:00
> The sad corollary to "you will be noticed only if you put out fires" is nobody actually realizes the elegant solution you shipped will stop tons of these fires from happening. Rather the reaction will be "that looked simple and easy so probably is not important".

Or that reaction is really "that looked simple, easy and like the last 10 "elegant solutions" that caused fires".
by powera | 2026-02-05 15:39:41+00:00
This seems to have a fundamental misunderstanding of Hacker News's front page. The goal is to have posts only show up for at most a day or two. I would expect 100% to be gone in a week.

The "outliers" are posts that were deleted and re-submitted, or possibly boosted by the moderators. The "visible for 44 days" post was only submitted 14 days ago; either it was deleted or it is a glitch in this guy's script.
by pixl97 | 2026-02-05 15:39:45+00:00
Heh, what a perfect setup for attackers.

UI is perfect for 'vote' manipulation. That is download your own plugin hundreds of times to get it to the top. Make it look popular.

No way to share to other that the plugin is risky.

Empowers users to do dangerous things they don't understand.

Users are apt to have things like API keys and important documents on computer.

Gold rush for attackers here.
by belter | 2026-02-05 15:39:49+00:00
Why dont you read the article? The answers are there. And even if they were only raising the question, the detailed numbers alone would still justify the article, and those were included too...

"...Tourism continues to play a key role in supporting Spanish services activity, which grew by 0.8% in the quarter. Construction also made a notable contribution, with output rising by 2.1%. Lower energy prices and easing inflation have helped sustain consumer confidence and encouraged spending.

Portugal also grew by 0.8% in the final quarter, matching its performance from the previous three months and outperforming the market forecast of 0.5%.

On a yearly basis, Portugal’s economy expanded by 1.9% in 2025. While that is slightly lower than the 2.1% recorded in 2024, it remains well above the eurozone average.

However, the composition of growth differed from that of its Iberian neighbour.

Portugal’s economy was lifted mainly by an improvement in the trade balance. A sharp drop in imports, particularly in petroleum products, helped offset weaker domestic demand and gave overall output a positive push..."
by phil21 | 2026-02-05 15:39:53+00:00
You could claim ignorance that you had no idea what the box in your bag was, and thought it was a radiotherapy device that had health benefits or something. If you could then prove that you bought it from a website advertising it as such and had a true belief you had no idea it jammed communications in any manner then you’d have a case of an unintentional act.

Here the guy bought a jammer that has exactly one use - jamming communications. He then presumably brought it with him on purpose and intentionally hit the power button to turn it on.

It’s not really a borderline case like some things could be.

It’s roughly the same as shooting at someone you hate who happens to be in a crowd and hitting a bystander on accident. It’s still an intentional act and you would be guilty of intentional murder of some type if they died.
by intended | 2026-02-05 15:39:56+00:00
> When can we say we have enough AI?

I’m good for now.

I am already tired of the disaster that is social media. Hilariously, we’ve gotten to the point that multiple countries are banning social media for under 18s.

The costs of AI slop are going to be paid by everyone, social media will ironically becoming far less useful, and the degree of fraud we will see will be … well cyber fraud is already terrifying, what’s the value of infinity added to infinity.

I would say that tech firms are definitely running around setting society on fire at this point.

God, they built all of this on absurd amounts of piracy, and while I am happy to dance on the grave of the MPAA and RIAA, the farming of content from people who have no desire to be harvested is absurd. I believe wikipedia has already started seeing a drop in traffic, which will lead to a reduction in donations. Smaller sites are going to have an even worse time.
by laurentiurad | 2026-02-05 15:39:59+00:00
“Overkill for 85% of people” is a vibes statistic, not an argument.

Also you're generalizing some things to the whole sector like every software provider now is useless and the new features they add are not bringing any values. How can you make such generic statements about a sector that is so diverse?

I start to suspect some of you are just private-equity-sponsored accounts trying to push Anthropic propaganda over the Internet.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-05 15:40:02+00:00
> If you want to argue that they wouldn't solve the housing problem in SFH neighborhoods

I am arguing that anyone who blames the presence of parking for housing supply issues has failed to understand both the geometry and scale of the problem (or more likely imo is actively attempting to push an anti-personal-car narrative).

> the road infrastructure alone to get that many cars in and out of the garages would bankrupt Beijing or Shanghai.

I wasn't talking about traffic engineering problems. Only raw square footage for living space. You can generalize the question I posed as - in an alternate reality where every housing unit in (say) Beijing were precisely 10% larger, and total stock were reduced proportionally to accommodate that change, but everything else were exactly the same (improbably, I know) would that make or break the housing market in terms of supply and demand? The answer is that it would not. Housing supply problems are not due to a mere 10% shortage.

> More first world problems and American exceptionalism I guess.

I don't follow? What about my objection to reducing buffer space comes across as "American exceptionalism" to you? And why do you disagree?

It's simply a matter of geometry. Expanding the footprint by a few feet versus duplicating the entire structure upwards multiple times. Obviously that doesn't apply to places that already build upwards to the extent physically possible but since approximately nowhere in the US does that it's neither here nor there.
Show HN: KvatchCLI – Query Multiple Data Sources with SQL(Postgres,CSV,APIs)
by squeakycheese | 2026-02-05 15:40:07+00:00
Hi HN! I'm launching Kvatch CLI v1.0.0-beta today — a tool that lets you query multiple data sources (Postgres, CSV, Google Sheets, APIs, etc.) as if they were a single SQL database.

Demo: https://github.com/kvatch-hub/kvatch-cli
Download: https://github.com/kvatch-hub/kvatch-cli/releases/tag/v1.0.0...

## Why I Built This

As a data engineer, I got tired of the "export-download-import-wrangle" dance every time I needed to join data from different sources. The usual workflow:

1. Export from Postgres
2. Download CSV from somewhere
3. Grab data from Google Sheets
4. Spend 3 hours in Python/Excel joining everything
5. Fix encoding issues
6. Realize you exported wrong columns
7. Repeat

It's 2026. This shouldn't be so hard.

## What It Does

Define data sources in YAML and query across them with standard SQL:

```yaml
connectors:
- name: prod_db
type: postgres
connection: postgres://localhost/production

- name: sales_data
type: csv
connection: ./sales.csv

datasets:
- name: analysis
query: |
SELECT u.name, s.revenue
FROM prod_db.users u
LEFT JOIN sales_data s ON u.id = s.user_id
```

Run: `kvatch query --plan analysis.yaml`

Kvatch executes the query across sources and returns results — no exports, no intermediate files.

## Technical Approach

- Written in Go (single binary, ~12MB)
- Uses SQL federation (not ETL — queries sources directly)
- Local SQLite for caching/intermediate results
- Pluggable connector architecture
- Supports Postgres, MySQL, SQLite, CSV, JSON, Google Sheets, Git repos, REST APIs

Everything runs locally. Your data never leaves your machine.

## Current Status

Core engine is production-ready (tested with real datasets), but calling it "beta" because I want feedback before v1.0. Some UX polish still needed (diagnostics commands, better logging, etc.).

Supported platforms: macOS (Intel + Apple Silicon), Linux (x86_64 + ARM64), Windows.

## What's Next

Building a paid "remote mode" for teams: shared plans, scheduled queries, web UI, access control. Local mode will stay free forever.

## Try It

```bash
brew tap kvatch-hub/tap
brew install kvatch

# Or download: https://github.com/kvatch-hub/kvatch-cli/releases

kvatch init
kvatch query --plan examples/quickstart/plan.yaml
```

Examples: https://github.com/kvatch-hub/kvatch-cli/tree/main/examples

Happy to answer questions! Feedback very welcome.
by gwbas1c | 2026-02-05 15:40:10+00:00
But that wasn't the agenda.

That being said, I can't count the number of times I've passed someone who's going dangerously slow and drifting in their lane, only to see them staring down at their phone. If Humphreys only ran the device for about 30 seconds whenever he saw someone on their phone, he'd probably have gotten away with it for a lot longer.
by miohtama | 2026-02-05 15:40:15+00:00
I recommend book Accelerado by Charlie Stross:

Um.” Manfred finds it, floating three tiers down an elaborate object hierarchy. It’s flashing for attention. There’s a priority interrupt, an incoming lawsuit that hasn’t propagated up the inheritance tree yet. He prods at the object with a property browser. “I’m afraid I’m not a director of that company, Mr. Glashwiecz. I appear to be retained by it as a technical contractor with nonexecutive power, reporting to the president, but frankly, this is the first time I’ve ever heard of the company. However, I can tell you who’s in charge if you want.” “Yes?” The attorney sounds almost interested. Manfred figures it out; the guy’s in New Jersey. It must be about three in the morning over there. Malice—revenge for waking him up—sharpens Manfred’s voice. “The president of http://agalmic.holdings
.root.184.97.AB5 is http://agalmic.holdings
.root.184.97.201. The secretary is http://agalmic.holdings
.root.184.D5, and the chair is http://agalmic.holdings
.root.184.E8.FF. All the shares are owned by those companies in equal measure, and I can tell you that their regulations are written in Python. Have a nice day, now!”
by thatguy0900 | 2026-02-05 15:40:18+00:00
Not to mention I'm not even sure how that's supposed to be safer? The distracted drivers are now more distracted trying to figure out why their isn't working and people who weren't distracted listining to Spotify are now looking at their phones actively as well. Dude was literally making a bubble of people messing with their phones around him while he drives
by D-Machine | 2026-02-05 15:40:32+00:00
> I suspect the error in variance from assuming it IS normally distributed is far less than you're suggesting. [...] Like even if I'm off by a factor of 2 [...]

You would be deeply mistaken. Robust statistics texts (e.g. Wilcox) are full of examples of distributions that have zero skew and are even nearly indistinguishable by eye from a Gaussian, but where the differences in variance and thus resulting differences in conclusions drawn are profound. Heck, a sample from a Cauchy distribution looks not too bad, but in fact the variance is not even defined (or effectively infinite, and, thus, meaningless).

And even if you have enough data that statistical issues are not a concern, the problem is that most summary metrics (like effect sizes, heritability, etc) are developed under the assumptions of near-normality AND minimal skew, so that the effect size can be interpreted as something about the overlap and or positioning of the bulks of the distributions. But when skew and long tails are involved, the bulk itself is what is messed up, making most such metrics largely uninterpretable.

I.e. it isn't just that variance is hard to measure accurately here, it is that, even if measured accurately, variance isn't actually a meaningful metric here.

The few metrics that do remain interpretable in such cases tend to be those like HPDI in Bayesian methods, which look at actual distribution shapes and try to quantify a bulk in a sensible location. Likewise, meaningful effect sizes for skewed and long-tailed data need to actually take into account distribution overlap in meaningful regions. Heritability does not do this.
by belorn | 2026-02-05 15:40:44+00:00
Several years ago in Stockholm (2014) during a conference focus on the Internet, the Chief Technology Officer for Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign held a talk on how they revolutionary the campaign process by using targeted advertisement campaign on social networks, mostly Facebook, and how effective the technique was to reach voters during fund raising and getting their voters to vote. In their view, this was the first major use of social media during an election. The talk is still available on Youtube for those interested. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3WS9bs3Aps)

There are also articles from 2011 where political commenters noted how the Obama campaign broke new ground using targeted Facebook advertisement and outreach, and how EU politicians could learn from it. The many smaller, but in total larger donations given to Obama was contrasted with Hillary Clinton who had larger individual donations but less in total, and the commenters attributed this to the use of Facebook and finding and meeting a younger audience on those online platforms.

People thought that targeted advertisement was a good thing and politicians looked on the techniques from that election and saw the potential for power. It was mostly just those privacy advocates, free software advocates and security experts that expressed doubt and warned about the dangers.
by KomoD | 2026-02-05 15:41:13+00:00
> Behind VPN? "Log in to confirm you're not a bot."

Disable it then.

> Someone says the f-word or talks about a no-no topic? (oh no!) "Age restricted video, log in to prove your age."

Saying fuck is not enough to make it age restricted, and logging in isn't enough to verify your age because they require either a face scan or credit card.
by threethirtytwo | 2026-02-05 15:41:35+00:00
>There's people saying AI isn't living up its hype / valuation, I don't see many saying "utterly useless".

There's more people saying AI doesn't live up to the hype. The people who are saying it's utterly useless is still quite large on HN. It's just that most of them are midway through changing their story because reality is smashing them in the face.

>And there's plenty who worship at the altar of Claude.

I mean who doesn't use it? No one claims it's perfect or a god of code. But if you're not using it you're behind.
by carlosjobim | 2026-02-05 15:42:16+00:00
I'll explain the reasoning for why companies are reluctant to hire old people:

You can teach things to an unexperienced person, but you cannot unteach an experienced person. What experience an older person has greatly varies, and this experience could be very useful or useless, depending on what the person has done in life.

Unfortunately there is one experience/wisdom which almost all people learn with age, and that is being a knave. Just as our bodies and our minds generally deteriorate with age, so does the soul and the moral fibre - unfortunately. People seem to think that they have to fight the younger generations with deceit and manipulation. And employers aren't too keen to deal with such persons.

But things might also be changing. The people aging right now are of a higher quality than the current generation of old.

Also, many times your best employees will be old people. But they're harder to find.
by theptip | 2026-02-05 15:42:17+00:00
Possibly, but I don’t think it’s certain. For a SaaS to capture, you’d need a forward deployed engineer model. And then I would have ten different FDEs to liaise with, none of whom know my domain.

Vs if I contract a shop, then I have a dedicated team ramped up on my domain who then can vet infra providers and choose the best tech. So potentially still some SaaS, but probably shifting more to PaaS.

Similar to how you don’t hire your Salesforce or SAP contractors from these companies, I would predict this model spreads to other platforms too, and may make OSS viable in more places.
by NoGravitas | 2026-02-05 15:42:42+00:00
Even if you have plenty of memory for your work load, there are useful performance reasons for having some swap. The TLDR section of this link covers the important bits.

https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html

Relatively speaking, you do need a lot less swap than you did back in the day, but performance will suffer if you don't have some, and having too much doesn't cost you anything except storage.
by nine_k | 2026-02-05 15:42:45+00:00
Reactive UIs with unidirectional data binding (very important) seem to be the sweet spot. Spreadshees, which pioneered it in consumer software, still reign supreme.

React is quite fast, and is very compact (preact is half the sizef htmx). It seems to be the sweet spot for making rich web UIs.

In the end, this all was a red herring. The problem was in CoreSVG taking 1400ms to render an emoji, clearly a regression. A tweet would suffice to communicate this nugget, but for some reason the author wrote a long and winding piece.
by mothballed | 2026-02-05 15:43:01+00:00
The hilarious thing is they call it the "democrat" way.

Under democrat Biden, DHS jailed and detained me for 24 hours all while stating I was "not under arrest" and no probable cause that I had committed any crime. After they had finished, they retroactively got a warrant, to cover their ass, writing what was essentially 100% fabricated, claiming a completely (non-existent) unnamed dog told a completely unnamed officer that told yet another officer that I had drugs (thus impossible to ever cross-examine it in court the origin of their claim).
by 1718627440 | 2026-02-05 15:43:01+00:00
I do not know what "Linux" you are using.

user@machine:~$ python3
>>> with open('/tmp/a', 'wb') as f:
... f.write (b'a'*1000);
...
1000
>>> with open('/tmp/b', 'wb') as f:
... f.write (b'a'*1024);
...
1024

$ ll /tmp -h
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 1000 Feb 5 16:40 a
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 1.0K Feb 5 16:40 b