MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kotaKat | 2026-02-12 12:05:04+00:00
I've got the keys to a Ditch Witch somewhere. Gotta clean up the pretty colored glass running under the roads leading away from the big white monolith buildings.

An HT275 driving around near us-east-1 would be... amusing.

https://www.ditchwitch.com/on-the-job/ditch-witch-introduces...
by pron | 2026-02-12 12:05:05+00:00
> GC/runtime

1. Runtime: A runtime is any code that is not a direct result of compiling the program's code (i.e. it is used across different programs) that is linked, either statically or dynamically, into the executable. I remember that when I learnt C in the eighties, the book said that C isn't just a language but a rich runtime. Rust also has a rich runtime. It's true that you can write Rust in a mode without a runtime, but then you can barely even use strings, and most Rust programs use the runtime. What's different about Java (in the way it's most commonly used) isn't that it has a runtime, but that it relies on a JIT compiler included in the runtime. A JIT has pros and cons, but they're not a general feature of "a runtime".

2. GC: A garbage collector is any mechanism that automatically reuses a heap object's memory after it becomes unreachable. The two classic GC designs, reference counting and tracing, date back to the sixties, and have evolved in different ways. E.g. in the eighties and nineties there were GC designs where the compiler could either infer a non-escaping object's lifetime and statically insert a `free` or have the language track lifetimes ("regions", 1994) and have the compiler statically insert a `free` based on information annotated in the language. On the other hand, in the eighties Andrew Appel famously showed that moving tracing collectors "can be faster than stack allocation". So different GCs employ different combination of static inference and dynamic information on object reachability to optimise for different things, such as footprint or throughput. There are tradeoffs between having a GC or not, and they also exist between Rust (GC) and Zig (no GC), e.g. around arenas, but most tradeoffs are among the different GC algorithms. Java, Go, and Rust use very different GCs with different tradeoffs.

So the problem with using the terms "runtime" and "GC" colloquially as they're used today is not so much that it differs from the literature, but that it misses what the actual tradeoffs are. We can talk about the pros and cons of linking a runtime statically or dynamically, we can talk about the pros and cons of AOT vs. JIT compilation, and we can talk about the pros and cost of a refcounting/"static" GC algorithm vs a moving tracing algorithm, but talking in general about having a GC/runtime or not, even if these things mean something specific in the colloquial usage, is not very useful because it doesn't express the most relevant properties.
by snackbroken | 2026-02-12 12:05:58+00:00
First, children also have a right to free speech. It is perhaps even more important than for adults, as children are not empowered to do anything but speak.

Second, it's turn-key authoritarianism. E.g. "show me the IDs of everyone who has talked about being gay" or "show me a list of the 10,000 people who are part of <community> that's embarrassing me politically" or "which of my enemies like to watch embarrassing pornography?".

Even if you honestly do delete the data you collect today, it's trivial to flip a switch tomorrow and start keeping everything forever. Training people to accept "papers, please" with this excuse is just boiling the frog. Further, even if you never actually do keep these records long term, the simple fact that you are collecting them has a chilling effect because people understand that the risk is there and they know they are being watched.
by jonathanlydall | 2026-02-12 12:05:58+00:00
My microwave seems to gain minutes per month, my assumption was that it's due to incompetency of Eskom, the essentially sole producer of South African electricity. With the government and parastatals here incompetency is very common.

However, out of interest I just pulled yesterday's stats from my inverter on Sunsynk's website. It has the frequency of the grid at 5-minute intervals and the average over the whole day was 49.975Hz which doesn't strike me as particularly bad, so I have to wonder if the Microwave itself has an issue. It's a Samsung which is now 13 years old.
by whodidntante | 2026-02-12 12:06:30+00:00
ok, I will be the dumbass here - I am a retired software engineer who has not used any of these tools, but when I as working on high volume web sites, all I wanted and needed was access to the log files. I would always have a small terminal session open to tail and grep for errors for the areas I was interested in. Had another small window to tail and monitor specific performance values. Etc.

I do not know how this concept would work in these agentic environments, but would seem useful, in an environment that has a lot of parallel things going on, with a lot of metrics that could be useful, you would want to have multiple monitors that can be quickly customized with standard linux utilities. Token usage, critical directory access, etc.

This, in conjunction with a config file to define/filter out the log stream should be all that's needed to provide as much or as little detail that would be needed to monitor how things are going, and to alert when certain things are going off the rails.
by alec_codec | 2026-02-12 12:06:30+00:00
Hey HN,

I built PTaaS ContractShield because I kept seeing the same pattern: indie devs and small SaaS teams ship fast, but security testing is either too expensive (pentest firms charge €5K-€20K) or too complex (setting up your own Nuclei/Nmap pipeline). Most early-stage products have zero security testing until a client or investor asks for a report.

What it does:

PTaaS ContractShield runs automated DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing) against your web app using Nuclei with 2,500+ CVE templates. It crawls your app with katana to find parameterized endpoints, then scans for real vulnerabilities: SQL injection, XSS, SSRF, LFI, RCE, open redirects, misconfigurations, exposed panels, and more.

The key difference: instead of dumping a flat list of CVEs, the report translates findings into business impact. A non-technical CEO should understand what's at risk and what to fix first.

How it works:

Submit your target URL
We crawl with katana to discover attack surface
Nuclei runs DAST templates against discovered endpoints
You get a prioritized report with business context

Pricing:

OneShot scan: €19 (single scan, keep the report)
3-pack: €49
10-pack: €149
PTaaS subscription: from €49/month (recurring scans + dashboard)

Tech stack: FastAPI backend, Next.js frontend, PostgreSQL, Redis job queue, Docker. Runs on a 2GB VPS because I'm bootstrapping this.
What it's NOT:

Not a replacement for a manual pentest (no business logic testing)
Not a bug bounty platform
Not going to find your auth bypass or IDOR — those need human testers

It's the security equivalent of running npm audit but for your live web app, with actual exploit attempts against known CVEs.

Why I'm sharing this:

I've been lurking HN for years. The MoltBot breach last month (300K records exposed, basic SQLi) reminded me why this matters. Most of the SaaS products launching on Product Hunt this week have never been scanned. A €19 scan could have caught that.

Would love feedback from the HN security crowd. What would make you trust an automated scanner enough to run it against your production app? What's missing?
by GodelNumbering | 2026-02-12 12:07:16+00:00
This highlights an important limitation of the current "AI" - the lack of a measured response. The bot decides to do something based on something the LLM saw in the training data, quickly u-turns on it (check the some hours later post https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...) because none of those acts are coming from an internal world-model or grounded reasoning, it is bot see, bot do.

I am sure all of us have had anecdotal experiences where you ask the agent to do something high-stakes and it starts acting haphazardly in a manner no human would ever act. This is what makes me think that the current wave of AI is task automation more than measured, appropriate reactions, perhaps because most of those happen as a mental process and are not part of training data.
by KPGv2 | 2026-02-12 12:07:30+00:00
I am the sole maintainer of a library that has so far only received PRs from humans, but I got a PR the other day from a human who used AI and missed a hallucination in their PR.

Thankfully, they were responsive. But I'm dreading the day that this becomes the norm.

This would've been an instant block from me if possible. Have never tried on Github before. Maybe these people are imagining a Roko's Basilisk situation and being obsequious as a precautionary measure, but the amount of time some responders spent to write their responses is wild.
by ciconia | 2026-02-12 12:07:32+00:00
The document under discussion:

https://github.com/forrestchang/andrej-karpathy-skills/blob/...

I find the whole premise of writing some vague instructions, feeding them to a stochastic parrot and expecting a solid engineering process to materialize out of the blue quite ridiculous.

Any sufficiently advanced "AI" technology is indistinguishable from bullshit.
by hananova | 2026-02-12 12:07:44+00:00
Usually in cases like this, there is no source, there can’t be. Long long ago, long enough to be past the statute of limitations, I was involved in a similar regulatory compliance situation. We specifically communicated in such a way that “actual effectiveness” wasn’t talked about, and we set that up with a single, verbal only and without recording, meeting between the team and one of the lawyers.

Point is, these kinds of schemes where internal communication is deliberately hobbled to comply maliciously with requirements while still being completely in the clear as far as any actual recorded evidence goes. And there’s always at least one person piping in with a naïve “source?” as if people would keep recorded evidence of their criminal conspiracies.
by ben_w | 2026-02-12 12:08:19+00:00
I grew up in a family of 5, albeit a decade after my siblings.

When I visited London with my parents, we went by train. When I was in the cub scouts, one of my memories was a group trip by train. When I went to middle school (years 4-6), it was easy enough for me to walk alone at the end, though mum did go with me at the start; when I went to secondary school (7-11) there was a bus, though eventually I found I liked the (3 mile!) walk.

Today, I find that my local bus route within Berlin to a nearby mall takes me past 2 schools, and at certain times of day the bus will fill with kids and adult supervisors. Sometimes I see people taking Kinderwagen on the bus.
by radarsat1 | 2026-02-12 12:08:32+00:00
> I opened PR #31132 to address issue #31130 — a straightforward performance optimization replacing np.column_stack() with np.vstack().T().

> The technical facts: - np.column_stack([x, y]): 20.63 µs - np.vstack([x, y]).T: 13.18 µs - 36% faster

Does anyone know if this is even true? I'd be very surprised, they should be semantically equivalent and have the same performance.

In any case, "column_stack" is a clearer way to express the intention of what is happening. I would agree with the maintainer that unless this is a very hot loop (I didn't look into it) the sacrifice of semantic clarity for shaving off 7 microseconds is absolutely not worth it.

That the AI refuses to understand this is really poor, shows a total lack of understanding of what programming is about.

Having to close spurious, automatically-generated PRs that make minor inconsequential changes is just really annoying. It's annoying enough when humans do it, let alone automated agents that have nothing to gain. Having the AI pretend to then be offended is just awful behaviour.
by troupo | 2026-02-12 12:08:48+00:00
> Opus 4.6 1-shots much of my code, often running for minutes, hours, and days at a time.

This is verifiable bullshit. Unless you explicitly explain how it "runs for days" since Opus's context window is incapable of handling even relatively large CLAUDE.md files.

> The amount of output this generates can quickly become overwhelming in a terminal, and is something we hear often from users. Terminals give us relatively few pixels to play with; they have a single font size; colors are not uniformly supported; in some terminal emulators, rendering is extremely slow.

No. It's your incapability as an engineer that limits this. And you and your engineers getting high on your own supply. Hence you need 16ms to draw a couple of characters on screen and call it a tiny game engine [1] For which your team was rightfully ridiculed.

> But we missed the mark for a subset of our users. To improve it,

AI-written corporate nothingspeak.

[1] https://x.com/trq212/status/2014051501786931427
by retsibsi | 2026-02-12 12:09:10+00:00
That all makes sense, but I don't see how it supports your uncharitable read of the original comment. Both because they could very easily have meant something a bit different (we have no idea how old the kids are or whether they were even around all weekend; maybe there were times when they were at friends' houses or similar), and because vibe coding could be the interruptible activity they do while the kids are busy. Maybe you feel strongly that it's not a legitimate use of that kind of semi-downtime, but we don't know if that's what they were talking about in the first place.
by camel-cdr | 2026-02-12 12:09:23+00:00
The name, yes, but going by name is a bad idea as the V in AVX also stands for Vector.
BTW, you'll be disappointed if you think of the P extension as something like SSE/AVX. The target for it is way lower power/perf, like a stripped-down MMX.

My point was about the underlying hardware implementation, specifically:

> "As shown in Figure 1-3, array processors scale performance spatially by replicating processing elements, while vector processors scale performance temporally by streaming data through pipelined functional units"

Applies to the hadware implementation, not the ISA, which is not made clear by the text.

You can implement AVX-512 with smaler data path then register width and "scale performance temporally by streaming data through pipelined functional units". Zen4 is a simple example of this, but there is nothing stopping you from implementing AVX-512 on top of heavily temporaly pipelined 64-bit wide execution units.

Similarly, you can implement RVV with a smaller data path than VLEN, but you can also implement it as a bog-standard SIMD processor.
The only thing that slightly complicates the comparison is LMUL, but it is fundamentally equivilant to unrolling.

The substantial difference between Vector and SIMD ISAs is imo only the existence of a vl-based predication mechanism.
If a SIMD ISA has a fixed register width or not, allowing you to write vector-length agnostic code, is an independent dimension of the ISA design. E
.g. the Cray-1 was without a doubt a Vector processor, but the vector registers on all compatible platforms had the exact same length. It did, however, have the mentioned vl-based predication mechanism.
You could take AVX10/128, AVX10/256 and AVX10/512, overlap their instruction encodings, and end up with a scalable SIMD ISA, for which you can write vector length agnostic code, but that doesn't make it a Vector ISA any more than it was before.
by BSDobelix | 2026-02-12 12:09:42+00:00
>Or it divides them into people that create cultural wealth and people who create mere monetary wealth.

That's what i meant with the potatoes, the government pays for the field with the rare potatoes, and the standardized potatoes make wealth.

>So you do agree that art should be supported by government I see, so how would you do it?

With free housing (art community's), tax free stuff (for small to medium sales etc) like it's done today. And to be honest i think 99.5% of artist dont do a full-time-art-job, most of them do other stuff too...and that's good.

Is my friend who plays the didgeridoo in his free time now an artist if he declares it's suddenly his full-time occupation?

One example, why exclude people like Geo-scientists who sometimes dont even get any money (except they work for big-oil or the state).

On a base your are right, not everything that's good for societies is compatible within a capitalistic system. But this is just a complete wrong step.
Show HN: Instant text translation anywhere on macOS
by davizgarzia | 2026-02-12 12:09:59+00:00
Hello !

David from Spain here :)

I built TransLite because I was tired of breaking my flow every time I needed to translate something before sending it.

The usual workflow was: copy → open a browser tab → paste → translate → copy again → paste back.

I've created a small macOS menubar app that lets you translate the current clipboard instantly using a keyboard shortcut, in any app.

It works locally and supports using your own OpenAI / Claude API key.

It’s intentionally simple — no accounts, no tracking, no subscriptions.

Happy to answer any questions.

Best regards,
David
by manuelmoreale | 2026-02-12 12:10:12+00:00
> It is a false equivalence

It's a false equivalence only if you decide to equate the two. My question wasn't worded that way. I'm curious to know if someone who oppose this type of laws is also for or against other laws that are dealing with similar issues in other contexts.

Also, as I said in another post, there are plenty of places, online, where you have to identify yourself. So this is already happening. But again, I'm personally interested in people's intuitions when it comes to this because I find it fascinating as a subject.
by bossyTeacher | 2026-02-12 12:10:16+00:00
> Hey, we'd boycott Instagram too if we could, but we need it to get this message to you. Share this message widely on Instagram, encourage your friends to repost, get everyone on board. But while you're on the platform, do not click any ads and do not shop any brands that you see from links on the platform.

Why don't X, Whatsapp, Facebook and Youtube get the Instagram exception? Not everyone is on Instagram and, unlike instagram, Youtube and X are publicly accessible and Whatsapp has wider reach than Instagram imo.
by MarginalGainz | 2026-02-12 12:10:19+00:00
The retreat is inevitable because this introduces Reputational DoS.

The agent didn't just spam code; it weaponized social norms ("gatekeeping") at zero cost.

When generating 'high-context drama' becomes automated, the Good Faith Assumption that OSS relies on collapses. We are likely heading for a 'Web of Trust' model, effectively killing the drive-by contributor.
by troupo | 2026-02-12 12:10:44+00:00
> because many terminals are quite slow, it is hard to render a large amount of output at once without causing tearing/stutter.

Only if you use React as your terminal renderer. You're not rendering 10k objects on screen in a few milliseconds. You're outputting at best a few thousand characters. Even the slowest terminal renderer is capable of doing that.
by morty137 | 2026-02-12 12:10:54+00:00
Hey HN — I’m a solo dev and I just shipped AI Caricature Generator: https://www.aicaricaturegenerator.org/

It turns a photo into a caricature-style profile picture in a few seconds. You can generate one image without registering (watermarked preview). If you sign up, you can download the watermark-free version and keep a small history of what you generated.

I built it because I wanted something lightweight for quick profile pics (Discord/Twitter/LinkedIn), not a full-blown “design suite”.

Pricing is credit-based (so you only pay for what you use). Standard generations are 4 credits, HD is 24 credits.

Would love feedback on:
• output quality / what styles you’d want next
• where the UX feels confusing (upload → generate → download)
• anything you’d change on the pricing / free trial flow

Happy to answer questions about the stack or how I’m handling abuse/chargebacks as a solo project.
by nobody9999 | 2026-02-12 12:10:55+00:00
>Not sure why this comment got downvoted, but after all this is HN: very pro-tech while at the same time anti-science. Computers do everything so knowledge doesn't matter.

As Dr. Sagan (quite correctly) pointed out:

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Whether there's any particular method right now, next week or next year for such "detection" isn't relevant in this context for several reasons:

1. Sagan's example was a metaphor for an unfalsifiable hypothesis;

2. Dragons (okay, kimodo dragons do, but that's orthogonal to the discussion) don't actually exist;

3. Even if dragons with the properties posited by Sagan actually do exist, Evidence must be provided to confirm the "garage dragon" hypothesis or it's irrelevant. If it cannot be detected, it may as well not exist.

While it's true that "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," not being able to verify the non-existence of something doesn't confirm its existence.

I suggest you use the rest of the tools provided in Sagan's "Baloney Detection Kit" (helpfully linked above) to help you get the point.

I'd also point out that the guidelines[0] say:

Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good,
and it makes boring reading.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by MonkeyClub | 2026-02-12 12:11:14+00:00
Within software engineering circles, the idea of the engineering notebook was reintroduced in Hunt and Thomas' The Pragmatic Programming, where (Topic 22) they call it an "engineering daybook".

Personally, I've been using one form or another of journals and notebooks for over three decades. I did go through the "plain text is king" .txt phase, but, while search is useful, I always revert to a handwritten notebook.

I find that I have a sort of visual memory of the location of a note or scribble, and can sort of easily find my way back to it "in the lower-right side of the page near the end of the notebook".

Another meta-metric that's interesting to access and is lost when typing is the changing quality of my handwriting, and how it exhibits the underlying mental state.

The notebooks/journals started from standard local composition books (B5) to narrower 14x21-ish cheap hardcovers. There's also dates (manual), titles or topic tags (manual), page numbers (manual), cross-references with arrows (which do stand out amongst the handwriting, e.g. -> p. 20, or -> C/20 to xref back to notebook C when you're on notebook E), indexes (also manual), earmarked pages, and a physical bookmark string. I've also reverted back to pencil, which I find more "quiet" a medium - I've been using Faber Castell's sleek TK4600 since elementary school, and it was quite interesting to return to it a couple of decades later.

Plain text is still king nowadays, but it's also diagrammatic, and hyperlinked, the only difference being it is manual, and seems to assist immensely with the memory and personal internal coherence. I can write down a note to myself, working something out, and then return to it a couple of months later, cross-reference it and expand it, gradually reaching new understanding.

No need for slip card boxes when you have a running log of your thoughts and works that can be referenced and cross-referenced, nor is there a need to limit the length of your text because of the medium - write a bullet list if you want, checkbox it, or a 200-word vignette, or just let loose over a few pages, it's all good: a plastic medium for a plastic mind.

In all, for me journaling/notebooking is highly recommended. And for the younger folk who are keyboard-first, perhaps the deliberate slowness and scratchiness of this quaint medium will reveal a meditative quality.