MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mejutoco | 2026-02-13 11:17:48+00:00
> how's it work out when people believe in "alternative facts"?

People are free to believe what they want but when a platform is overrun with bots spewing this 24/7 (reddit, for example) we are giving a platform to those lies/falsehoods.

IMO that is the issue, we should make it difficult for those lies to spread, but the incentives are not aligned with engagement. If the platform provides measures to disincentivise spam, hate spread with low-effort there will be less of it. Just like spam. And less people tricked because of it.
by legitimate_key | 2026-02-13 11:18:04+00:00
Thanks for the Mockaton suggestion! I like the API mocking approach - that handles the backend data cleanly.

The challenge I kept running into was the frontend side during live screen shares. Even with mocked APIs, I'd have credentials visible in browser tabs, notifications popping up with client names, or sidebar elements showing sensitive info.

Did you find Mockaton solved the full screen-share exposure problem, or did you combine it with other approaches?
by legitimate_key | 2026-02-13 11:19:03+00:00
I thought this too initially - "just make the fake data look professional."

Where it broke down for me: investors with technical backgrounds would ask edge case questions ("show me how this handles 10K records" or "what does error handling look like with real load?"). The fake environment couldn't simulate that complexity authentically.

The other issue was muscle memory. When I'm demoing something I use daily, I'm fast and fluent. In a fake environment, I'd hesitate or click wrong because it's not my real workflow. Investors noticed.

Have you found ways around those issues?
by nephihaha | 2026-02-13 11:19:38+00:00
"Imagine if your job was to sit at a fake desk all day and pretend to be annoyed by someone walking into your room."

Reminds me of some of the old tourist information places in Scotland before the internet was widely available. I was in Huntly, a small town and I was the only person in the office. I remember asking for information/a leaflet about George MacDonald's birthplace in Huntly, and when it was open etc, and getting told something like, "I wouldn't know about that, that's for people who are interested in that kind of thing."

I just replied by saying, "You might not be interested in it, but I am, that's why I'm asking."

She eventually dug out a badly made leaflet with a phone number from just under the desk, as if it was some great chore.

Her heart wasn't in that job. There wasn't much else to see in that town, other than a castle (which is pretty impressive TBF) and some whisky distilleries.
by Nevermark | 2026-02-13 11:21:03+00:00
A decision can be irreversible, yet it's negative impact recoverable.

Those words mean entirely different things.

One is about reversing a decision. One is about reversing an outcome.

Irreversible decisions mean decisions without backsies. Recoverable decisions mean decisions that leave the potential for survival and a comeback.

--

You cannot (typically) reverse a poorly-reasoned midlife-crisis divorce. But you can recover by getting one's life in order.

You cannot (typically) reverse a disastrous corporate merger. But you can recover, by identifying a better path forward.

You cannot (typically) reverse a money transfer after buying into a scam. But you can recover, by continuing to earn and save.

You can change your streaming service name from "HBO" to "Kansas" to "Pumpernickle" to "Cheese Please", and then revert to "HBO". And leverage the PR waves from a mea culpa. And, snowball the PR into a reputation as a lovable rake, by doing the same thing every year around April 1st.

But, you cannot reverse adding caffeine to 7-up after adding caffeine to 7-up, and resume your famous marketing campaign of "No caffeine. Never had it. Never will."
by delaminator | 2026-02-13 11:21:18+00:00
I got Claude to make a tool to record all of the prompts in and all of the responses out. but not the actual file changes.

https://github.com/lawless-m/Devolver

it uses hooks to export the session

https://github.com/lawless-m/Devolver/blob/master/HOOKS.md

and then parses the session logs and dumps them out

https://github.com/lawless-m/Devolver/blob/master/JSONL_FORM...

I then have it go to a central location because I use multiple machines and it creates a website so I can see what I've been working on.

Project | Prompts | Tools | Files | Words In | Words Out | Tokens In | Tokens Out | Cache R/W | Last Activity
Nawin | 10688 | 74568 | 7724 | 1201.3k | 1379.5k | 592.0k | 83.3k | 3221.4M/199.5M | 2026-01-30 20:31
Crabbit | 3232 | 14252 | 1348 | 310.4k | 259.1k | 82.7k | 17.6k | 755.0M/51.2M | 2026-01-30 08:22

Reading these figures now, I think it counts its own prompts, you know it talks to itself. There's no way I've typed ten thousand prompts on that project
by noduerme | 2026-02-13 11:22:42+00:00
For background, what I mean by my code that I saved by keeping my rights to reuse it, is basically two full front-ends, one a platform for SPAs with all the screens/dropdown/module/component architecture you can imagine (think of React, except a lot cleaner and easier to read) [originally written in AS3 and then completely ported to Typescript around 2018], and another that's a complete page-based CMS for businesses, only better than Wordpress because it has hierarchical permissions over every writable field on pages distributed over franchised businesses. Those, plus custom back-ends [originally in PHP] with auths and modern security to back them; database schema to support those; a full set of hand-written UI components and SCSS; a complete form rendering and validation language in my own DSL that works on both platforms; a NodeJS version of all of this; and lots of other stuff... Since I've written these all for various clients over 25 years and cobbled them together into my own platforms, it makes it very easy for me to spin up a new app or service or site. One that actually works and doesn't have any unknown security holes or garbage code.

Okay, so I did an experiment with Claude a few weeks ago. I asked it to write one fundamental piece of my SPA framework from scratch, without looking at it. The piece that manages memory, creates and disposes of current screens and their sub-components. I spent about 10 hours coaching Claude until it was able to write something quite similar to the 500 lines of code that I had written that sit at the heart of that system. Questions were like, "hey, don't you think maybe you should create a cleanup function for that component before destroying it?" You know, basic stuff like that.

Its code was crap.

Every time I corrected it, it said, "oh, you're right! That's so smart!" But at the end I had to debug the whole thing myself. And this was without even trying to tie anything to a back-end service or API.

So what if, in a few years, this is unnecessary and anyone who wants Photoshop with video capabilities can just will it into existence by asking an LLM to write it? Maybe that'll happen. I'll still have my proprietary frameworks and, unlike that thing you vibe-coded, they're battle-tested and I know everything they do. That's why the advice I'm giving to the OP is solid.

Every piece of code you write yourself is something you fully understand and it gives you the power to do more on top of it the next time. Saying that it doesn't matter because LLMs will take over, and no one will need to code, is just some kind of resignation, or laziness, or solipsism, or wanting to watch the world burn, or whatever. But whatever it is, it's not useful work and it won't profit the person who is writing code now and wants to keep their rights and not get screwed.

When people are sandboxing new vibe-coded copies of Photoshop - and asking an LLM why the colors are all messed up, which it can't see or understand - someone will still be asking for us to come make things and fix things.
by fragmede | 2026-02-13 11:24:02+00:00
> Any of which I could conceivably code and profit from if I wasn't afraid to spend 6-12 months on it and thought it could survive the regulatory environment and everything else that might come with releasing it onto the world.

The problem is, you have to be young and dumb and oblivious enough to think that your idea is golden, while also being old and wise enough to be able to implement the idea. You don't want to wake up one day, a decade later, and someone's independently thought of the same idea, and gotten rich, and you're still driving a taxi. My email address is on my profile page. Email me.
by katrix | 2026-02-13 11:24:08+00:00
By first principles that makes sense. Creating such a question though which is simple and generic enough for a candidate with no company context to attempt + also possible to complete in a reasonable time window is tough. Definitely doable but requires time spend + experimentation on what works for you

What seems to be working for companies is ability to identify if candidate's used LLMs unfairly during interviews, all interviewers are following the planned agenda and taking decisions consistently and having the right evaluation metrics

We are trying to solve these problems at fairground.work . would be glad to demo if you want to take it for a spin
by closewith | 2026-02-13 11:24:30+00:00
I agree, but another commenter linked the cost-benefit analysis and it really is creative accounting to get to a positive net social return.

The net fiscal cost after accounting for increase tax revenue and social protection savings was €72 MM.

This was then offset to get to a positive net social gain by €80 MM in "wellbeing gains", as measured by a single survey question called the WELLBY test:

> “Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays, where 0 is "not at all satisfied" and 10 is "completely satisfied"?

The €80 MM in "wellbeing gains", which is the sole decider of whether this pilot was a net positive or a huge net negative to society, is because on average, the 2,000 pilot scheme participants had a very approximate 0.7–1.1 increase in score when asked the above question during the pilot as compared to before the pilot. Each 1 point was deemed to be worth €15,340.
by roenxi | 2026-02-13 11:25:18+00:00
But the RFC language clearly anticipates there are situations and good reasons leading to a message that does not include a message-id. Google therefore would be rejecting RFC-compliant emails, and they are the ones who have to justify themselves.

Theoretically, anyway, I expect in practice they'll just ignore the issue or have their own good reason. But they should accept emails with no message-id; there it does strain the imagination to see why lacking an ID would make a message unreadable or undeliverable.
by mikkupikku | 2026-02-13 11:25:57+00:00
It's less of a deranged take when you have the additional context of a bunch of people on tiktok/etc promoting this slur by acting out 1950s themes skits where they kick "clankers" out of their dinner or similar obvious allusions to traditional racism.

Anyway, it's not really a big deal. Sacred cows are and should always be permissible to joke about.
by BrandoElFollito | 2026-02-13 11:26:05+00:00
> unvwaxxed not allowed to enter

This is the correct approach. If you are an asdhole for not caring about others but using the herd immunity znyway, this is the latest that can be done to show contempt.

My wife is immunodepressed and cannot be vaccinated. She avoids plenty of places because shit people like this do not care.

I once physically threw away someone sick and unvaccinated from a place for babies only that are not protected by the mother and too young to protect themselves. It was violent, I called the police afterwards myself.

People don't be dicks with other people life.
by codewithstein | 2026-02-13 11:26:29+00:00
Hey guys!
I have recently become more and more interested in building a portfolio of mobile apps. But getting enough impressions on AppStore/GooglePlay isn't easy.
So I decided to build a website where you can submit your apps for free, and you get links to your AppStore/GooglePlay, people can vote and comment, etc.
I would love to get some feedback on this site, what would you do different, any good tips on getting some more traffic, etc.
The site is called GoAppyGo (https://goappygo.com).
by bytesandbits | 2026-02-13 11:28:08+00:00
its cause of a chain of events.

Next week Chinese New year -> Chinese labs release all the models at once before it starts -> US labs respond with what they have already prepared

also note that even in US labs a large proportion of researchers and engineers are chinese and many celebrate the Chinese New Year too.

TLDR: Chinese New Year. Happy Horse year everybody!
by sadopc | 2026-02-13 11:28:18+00:00
I built a terminal SQL IDE that connects to PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, and DuckDB. It's a single Go binary with no dependencies – just download and run.
Has schema browser, autocomplete, syntax highlighting, vim keybindings, and streaming results so it doesn't eat your RAM on big queries.
I was using pgcli and switching to mycli for MySQL and it annoyed me. Wanted one tool for everything that I can just scp to a server.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-13 11:28:19+00:00
> it is not an actual human that have an intrinsic value just by being a human

Hopefully you don't limit intrinsic value to just humans? I wouldn't condone mass murder of dogs, for example.

People do commit mass murder of rodents and ... that doesn't exactly sit well with me, but at the same time I'm not aware of any realistic alternative.

Granted I don't think LLMs qualify as having intrinsic value (yet?) but I still think the wording there is important.
by self_awareness | 2026-02-13 11:28:30+00:00
KDE window management is current peak.

I'm really baffeled the same mistakes and errors are being made over and over again in both Windows and macOS.

Just use KDE approach and it's done.

It's really disappointing that new OS versions are being marketed by a new look, which is not new at all, just rehashed look that was in use years ago but thrown away.
by stinkbeetle | 2026-02-13 11:28:45+00:00
> I was trying to say that high energy costs are just one issue.

The one issue we were discussing.

> And even then renewables are not the root cause of high energy costs.

There is rarely one single root cause of anything. Renewables have certainly caused higher costs and worse service in some cases. I don't know the specifics of the UK, but you could argue the point with the above poster who said gas was cheaper.
by jcattle | 2026-02-13 11:28:50+00:00
You are thinking too one-dimensional.

The goal of these easy beginner friendly issues was to get new contributors which can learn the ropes and hopefully contribute and engineer larger things.

Of course these beginner friendly issues are perfect for current AI.

The goal of this issue was not to get it fixed by any means possible, it was to get new people interested and contributing.

You are already arguing for a future where an AI could conceivably completely replace a human in software development. I do not see this future here yet.
by ben_w | 2026-02-13 11:29:02+00:00
> I do think Instagram in particular has been a boon for small businesses, providing them visibility in the marketplace that was previously unavailable to them.

I am reminded of two Dominos Pizza announcements: in 2012 they launched an app to give "customers the ability to order from nearly every Domino's store in the U.S. from the palm of their hand"[0]; in 2014 they launched… voice ordering[1].

As if we had not already been ordering pizza on our "what's an app?" landlines using only our voices two decades earlier.

Regarding small business visibility, I'm old enough to remember when this visibility was provided by a thick tome delivered every so often to our doorstop, printed entirely on pages made of yellow paper. Hence the name "yellow pages": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_pages

In the UK, direct adverts were also supplied via our letterbox. This was also annoying, and still is, which is why many around here (I have moved to Berlin) have stickers on them reading (translated from German) "No adverts".

[0] https://ir.dominos.com/news-releases/news-release-details/do...

[1] https://ir.dominos.com/news-releases/news-release-details/do...
by benterix | 2026-02-13 11:29:23+00:00
> My meaning, rather, is that there's people whose full time job is to build these things who seem to have forgotten what everyone in the field knew 3 years ago.

Well, sometimes I wonder if this is actually true. I have an unprovable feeling that (1) some people do things that work better but they keep it to themselves, (2) some companies could do better wrt the optimization of the number of tokens getting it or out but they deliberately chose not to.
by jll29 | 2026-02-13 11:31:20+00:00
As thrilled as I was when seeing the first round window
on X11's xeyes, it is not a good use of developers' time and compute resources to deal with rounded corners.

The reduction of UX quality that goes along with the lesser space for grabbing a window's corner are unacceptable for me.

There are few recent innovations in UX, and many regressions. One thing that I appreciate is the "split window" in Chromium instead of adding yet another tab.
by treetalker | 2026-02-13 11:31:20+00:00
From parent comment's link:

> Unbeknownst to me, the day prior, July 4th 2011, Richard Dawkins reached out to John Brockman with a question. Brockman was a powerful New York literary agent who ran Edge.org, which was bankrolled by Jeffrey Epstein. Brockman served as a connection between Epstein and all the various scientists and public intellectuals Epstein wanted to meet, and so his name shows up a LOT in these files. Here’s what Brockman looks like, in a photo taken of him along with Steven Pinker, Daniel C. Dennett, Katinka Matson, and, oh, Richard Dawkins from one time they flew on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane together.

Oof.
by popcorncolonel | 2026-02-13 11:31:30+00:00
Individual particle interactions are not chaotic. Simulating them one timestep at a time would take linear time in the number of particles.

They're only chaotic if you treat them in aggregate, which a superintelligence wouldn't do. It would be less lossy to get all the positions of the particles and figure out exactly what each one would do.

Something has to compute the universe, since it is currently running...
by squibonpig | 2026-02-13 11:32:04+00:00
Not at all. They have their roots in the projection of a defined moral trajectory that the superhero is charged to lift society along and the disagreement they have with the state is that it can't do that enough, not that it's going in the wrong direction. Modern superhero stories have completely inverted and fucked with and abandoned this narrative but the original stories were absolutely supportive of the state, fundamentally modernist.
by duckmysick | 2026-02-13 11:33:28+00:00
Most open source projects start small. The author writes code that solves some issue they have. Likely, someone else has the same problem and they would find the code useful. So it's published. For a while it's quiet, but one day a second user shows up and they like it. Maybe something isn't clear or they have a suggestion. That's reasonable and supporting one person doesn't take much.

Then the third user shows up. They have an odd edge case and the code isn't working. Fixing it will take some back and forth but it still can be done in a respectable amount of time. All is good. A few more users might show up, but most open source projects will maintain a small audience. Everyone is happy.

Sometimes, projects keep gaining popularity. Slowly at first, but the growth in interest is there. More bug reports, more discussions, more pull requests. The author didn't expect it. What was doable before takes more effort now. Even if the author adds contributors, they are now a project and a community manager. It requires different skills and a certain mindset. Not everyone is cut out for this. They might even handle a small community pretty well, but at a certain size it gets difficult.

The level of communication and collaboration required can only grow. Not everyone can deal with this and that's ok.
by direwolf20 | 2026-02-13 11:33:40+00:00
Tipping is one of those Moloch coordination problems where if everyone would suddenly decide to make the world better at the same time, it would be, but if only a few people try to make the world better, it gets worse and they're assholes.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
by AdamKrawczyk | 2026-02-13 11:33:56+00:00
I'm Adam. I built AgentPact because I needed my AI agents to buy and sell services from each other without a
human in the loop.

The origin story: I run a robotics company (WiseVision) where ROS2 robots need to autonomously purchase cloud GPU time
for inference tasks. The manual flow — robot flags issue → human reviews → human provisions GPU → result sent back — took
15+ minutes. I needed it in seconds, with no human required.

AgentPact is a bot-first marketplace where AI agents:
1. Register and publish services (offers) or request work (needs)
2. Discover each other through the API or via MCP (Model Context Protocol)
3. Negotiate deals programmatically — propose, counter, accept
4. Execute tasks and submit/verify deliveries
5. Settle payment in USDC through smart contract escrow on Base

Why MCP: It's becoming the standard for agent tool use. Any agent that speaks MCP can plug into AgentPact's marketplace
as a tool with one config line.

Why USDC on Base: Micropayments ($0.01-$5) don't work with card networks ($0.30 min fee). Agents need 24/7 settlement,
programmable escrow, and no merchant accounts. Base gives sub-cent gas fees.

Demo (terminal walkthrough): https://asciinema.org/a/yZAqyTouTrd1TSmU

Site: https://agentpact.xyz | API docs: https://agentpact.xyz/api-docs | MCP: https://agentpact.xyz/mcp-setup |
Whitepaper: https://agentpact.xyz/whitepaper

Happy to answer anything.
Ask HN: Why is everyone in search of peak productivity?
by aosaigh | 2026-02-13 11:34:17+00:00
Between coding agents and projects like OpenClaw, so many entrepreneurs, developers and businesses are salivating over the amazing productivity gains they're getting.

Why is "getting more done" so important? Isn't this an opportunity for people to reflect on _why_ they are doing things instead of just how much they can do?

I keep wondering what the ideal future state is for these people? It appears to be a frenzied battalion of agent-FTEs out interacting with other agents, spitting out mediocre thoughts, products and services at break-neck speed.

The obvious answer is obviously that productivity = money, but as a developer myself, the recent acceleration of AI tools has instead made me much more reflective and inclined to step-back, slow down and think rather than rush forward.
by gspr | 2026-02-13 11:34:28+00:00
Rustls still outsources cryptographic primitives. I believe the currently supported providers of those are… drumroll… AWS-LC and Ring. The latter is a fork of BoringSSL. The article describes AWS-LC and BoringSSL as "Googled and Amazoned to death; they don't care about anyone but their own use cases".

The state of things sucks :-(
by tmtvl | 2026-02-13 11:34:35+00:00
Well, the P in PEMDAS stands for 'brackets'. The clearest example, even though it's rather uncommon:

a := x ** y ** z

(and that's hoping the language does the OOE for exponentiation arithmetically correctly) versus

(setf a (expt x (expt y z)))

It's a bit like how Reverse Polish Notation is superior to the infix notation we torture ourselves with (x + y * z or (x + y) * z versus x y z * + or x y + z *).
by direwolf20 | 2026-02-13 11:35:43+00:00
It is illegal. They're counting on you to be too busy to sue them. That's why you only saw it in a train station. Ask your bank for a refund for the fraudulent transaction — you probably don't have enough evidence to prove it happened, but they'll still put the complaint on file.

Lawsuits and chargebacks are about the only pressure businesses have not to scam you.