MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eibrahim | 2026-02-15 15:31:02+00:00
the self-extending skills part is really interesting. ive been building AI agents with persistent memory for a while now and the skill/tool extensibility piece is where most frameworks fall short. they either give you a rigid plugin system or completley open-ended function calling with no guardrails.

how are you handling the trust boundary for self-created skills? thats usually where things get tricky.

also curious about the memory architecture. file-based memory (like markdown files the agent reads/writes) has been surprisingly effective in my experience compared to fancy vector DB approaches. simpler to debug, easier for the agent to reason about, and way less infrastructure overhead. whats your approach?
by jmacd | 2026-02-15 15:31:11+00:00
I went through the setup process for Openclaw. Near the end I felt like I had wrestled more with setting it up than I would have had to if I had just built it from the ground up. So I pointed Pi at Nanoclaw and asked it to review it and build me a minimal clone. It took a few minutes and I had the core of something that is easier to maintain (for me) than some unknown large and cumbersome system, or whatever Openclaw is.

To each their own.
by slibhb | 2026-02-15 15:31:39+00:00
> It just feels difficult to imagine that something they were so deeply invested in for generations wasn’t that important.

Southern culture was about having giant houses, partying, and not laboring. They didn't fight for the economics of it but rather to preserve that way of life.

> I’ve also wondered if the fiction of American exceptionalism is meant to help future generations pretend that the foundation of their success isn’t built upon an incredible horror perpetrated by their ancestors.

American exceptionalism isn't a fiction. It's probably a selection effect due to immmigration.

And the "incredible horror" is very real...but I'm not convinced that it was necessary ("built upon") for American success.
by s-macke | 2026-02-15 15:31:44+00:00
Author here. I’m happy to see one of my projects on Hacker News. This has been a fun one. One evening you just try to disassemble it and wonder where the code is. The following months were a truly satisfying experience, reverse-engineering this diamond.

There is still a functioning Forth interpreter implemented in the game. If they hadn’t removed all the word names, it would have been possible to debug at any time and analyze the program state and call functions live with real Forth code. Some crazy feature at that time.
by sovietmudkipz | 2026-02-15 15:32:20+00:00
I wonder if this will wind up being true. Yes it’s cheaper to produce an app but most normies I know don’t really want to produce an app. No instead they want to consume a curated app. If anything we’ve moved the value proposition from “it exists” to “it exists and is good, especially compared to the competition.”

App creators will be competing and copying each other. The software that can support change will probably win in the market. Probably…?
by pseudohadamard | 2026-02-15 15:32:37+00:00
Except that they're not mocking audiophiles, or calling them flat earthers. They're presenting the results of an experiment in a detached and fairly clinical manner. It's not the most rigorously-controlled experiment because they were having a bit of fun, but it's an experimental result nonetheless, and that's all it is, they're not judging people over it or calling them names.
by pjmlp | 2026-02-15 15:32:39+00:00
Most likely never will, because WinRT is the future and WinRT has replaced type libraries with .NET metadata. At least from MS point of view.

The current solution is to use the CLI tools just like C++.

However have you looked into ComWrappers introduced in .NET 8, with later improvements?

I still see VB 6 and Delphi as the best development experience for COM, in .NET it wasn't never that great, there are full books about doing COM in .NET.
by mettamage | 2026-02-15 15:32:46+00:00
> The math is simple: if it costs almost nothing to build an app, it costs almost nothing to clone an app. And if cloning is free, subscription pricing dies

Yes and no.

I have created 15 small apps that solves all kinds of things for me. However, at the department I work full of non-technical people, most of them don’t even know lovable exists.

And for the one that does know lovable exists, they tend to build stuff with some botched backend and you’ll get to scaling issues, security issues and who knows what else
by lokar | 2026-02-15 15:32:57+00:00
One thing to consider: it’s clear he was very widely connected in American elite circles. It’s likely that almost all prominent people (in finance, business, the arts, science, government, etc) all came across him. We know he worked pretty hard to get intertwined with everyone he could.

And yet, although the list of his connections is large, it’s very far from most of these people. It seems plenty of people saw him for who he was and steered clear.
by rekabis | 2026-02-15 15:33:14+00:00
People will still pay for convenience or functionality.

If there is a feature that cannot be done on-device, and that on-Internet feature can be effectively moated and duplication-resisted, then if it’s a feature that people think they need they will absolutely open their wallets to pay for.

The trick is finding that feature or attribute that cannot be done on-device, and then moating it against AI duplication. Do that, make it appear indispensable in the minds of people, and they will absolutely pay for it.
by kube-system | 2026-02-15 15:33:45+00:00
People often contain features in their body that look abnormal on an MRI but might not actually be issues. The issue is that an MRI doesn’t give enough information to know otherwise. This is why they are typically not used in a routine exam by mainstream medicine.

It’s like running ‘ls -la’ on a directory to determine if there are any issues with a piece of software. It could show things that are really bad. It could show things that look weird. But it won’t conclusively debug the code.
by speakingmoistly | 2026-02-15 15:33:47+00:00
> The pipeline takes an episode from research to published podcast automatically, with quality checks that catch hallucinations and anything that can’t be sourced back to an actual document.

What always gets me with this type of thing is that folks don't trust the LLM to not make things up (rightfully so), but will solve that problem with more LLM. What makes the LLM-based quality checks less prone to derailment?

It's not so surprising to read this further down

> One person can now do what a newsroom did and I don’t think people fully understand what that means yet.

This kind of naïveté is a major contributor to the ongoing spread of LLM-powered disinformation.
by chasing0entropy | 2026-02-15 15:34:22+00:00
Nvidia GPUs are still at their core reliant on the PC architecture,
Inferencing on Nvidia cores will soon be like encoding a h265 stream on CPU.

I expect custom built TPUs will have progressively more and more advanced hardware acceleration where legacy aspects of the CUDA architecture will eventually limit their innovation without architecture changes (pci-e, nvme bus, cpu interrupts, reliance on system ram for index tables, etc
..) which fill their moat and level the playing field for google/Amazon/eventually apple
by wortelefant | 2026-02-15 15:35:22+00:00
One use case I see for myself is to scan ccertain Obsidian folders for article drafts, add the cited literature to Zotero , even try to download them, and enhance the article draft with clear Zotero citation placehodlers while I am away. Also reminding me of stuff or doing research when I instruct it via telegram voice message is nice. Taking care of the boring stuff like updating a fitness tracker google spreadsheet, adding sources with my comments to Zotero and such. I hate data gardening.
by CPLX | 2026-02-15 15:36:08+00:00
I’ve been talking about this a lot with founder/coder types in my circle of friends with a wide variety of opinions.

My theory as an old guy is that the standards will just go up.

There’s a current business model where you can make a basic but useful tool that solves a specific business problem and make money. That’s going to end.

We’ve seen this before. A good example would be when the mobile app stores launched and you could get traction with just about anything. And then you couldn’t.
by throwawayqqq11 | 2026-02-15 15:36:23+00:00
I have little hope, since the EU is lobbyist-infested like the US, but there is a chance the EU will fund FOSS platforms over centralized solutions. There are already several EU wide or national funds for that and it would help immensly when that money would go to burning out solo devs and maybe even to orgs like mozilla.

https://eu-stf.openforumeurope.org/
by SoftTalker | 2026-02-15 15:36:49+00:00
IIRC around that time a lot of people were on Jabber. At least that was the case where I worked. We ran our own Jabber server but management made us shut it down because it wasn't a "core contributing technology" or something like that.

Google Chat in the early years worked with Jabber clients. Maybe with Wave they changed the protocol? That killed any interest in Google's chat technologies for me.

Still haven't ever used Slack. My office uses Teams now. It works but it's pretty unpleasant. Gets the basic task done I guess.
by Finbarr | 2026-02-15 15:36:56+00:00
I wrote an article about this a few days ago that has been gaining a lot of traction: https://finbarr.site/2026/02/12/in-defense-of-saas.html

Point solutions are going to be free. Complex systems with support, integrations, switching costs, customer data, etc., are not going to be free.
by MostlyStable | 2026-02-15 15:37:05+00:00
I hadn't heard the app store submission stats. Does this answer Mike Judge's question of where the shovelware is [0,1]? Did we just need to wait a few months?

[0] https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46262545
by pseudohadamard | 2026-02-15 15:37:13+00:00
Hey, don't diss SACD. I have a DVD player that happens to do SACD that I'm hoping to resell to an audiophile for five or more times what I paid for it at some point, I just have to wait another ten years or so for it to become a rare piece of classic audio hardware, so far it's only about 20 years old.
by crote | 2026-02-15 15:37:21+00:00
The counterpoint of this is Linux distros trying to resolve all global dependencies into a one-size-fits-nothing solution - with every package having several dozen patches trying to make a brand-new application release work with a decade-old release of libfoobar. They are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole and act surprised when it doesn't fit.

And when it inevitably leads to all kinds of weird issues the packagers of course can't be reached for support, so users end up harassing the upstream maintainer about their "shitty broken application" and demanding they fix it.

Sure, the various language toolchains suck, but so do those of Linux distros. There's a reason all-in-one packaging solutions like Docker, AppImage, Flatpak, and Snap have gotten so popular, you know?
by jmyeet | 2026-02-15 15:37:24+00:00
Once again we see tech companies capitulating to the US government who is actually doing the things we accuse China is theoretically doing in the future.

I don't own a smart speaker. It's actually annoying because there are so few options for a music system now. I've previously owned a Sonos but honestly it's just not a polished product. Anyway, my issue with smart speakers is I don't want a cloud-connected always-on microphones in my house. Sorry but no. You simply never know when law enforcement will use such a thing via a warrant nobody can tell you about (ie FISA). It could be targeted to you, individually but there are far worse alternatives.

It could be a blanket warrant against, say, people posting negatively against ICE online. Or microphones couldd be used to identify such people based on what it hears. You just have no control.

And once again, Google handed over PII voluntarily to the government recently [1]. Companies don't need to comply with administrative subpoenas. It takes a court order signed by a judge to enforce.

All of this is just another reason why China was correct to keep US tech companies out, basically. But here's where it's going to get much worse for the US and those same companies: when the EU decides enough is enough and creates their own versins that are subject to EU jurisdiction.

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/10/google-sent-personal-and-f...
by siva7 | 2026-02-15 15:37:34+00:00
> People have been complaining about app subscription costs for years. There's that old complaint: "Why do I have to keep paying for software after I already paid $1000 for my iPhone?" That might actually become reality now.

I'm seriously wondering if this blog is just some rage bait or if that guy is really that dumb? I can't tell anymore.
by ninjagoo | 2026-02-15 15:38:33+00:00
There is definitely a middleman question.

The bigger question is business model vs value-add. Copyright law draws a very direct line from value-add to compensation - if you created something new (or even derivative), copyright attaches to allow for compensation, if people find it valuable.

Business models are a different animal: they can range from value-add services and products to rent-seeking to monopolies, extracting value from both producers and consumers.

While copyright law makes no mention of business models, I don't know whether that is a historical artifact since copyright is presumably older, or a philosophical exclusion because society owes no business model a right to exist. I would suggest the existence of monopoly-busting government agencies argues that societies do not owe business models a right of existence. Fair compensation for the advancement of arts and sciences is clearly a public good, though.

Tying it back to the AI-in-the-middle question, it's yet another platform in a series of these between producers and consumers, and doesn't override copyright. Regurgitating a copyright (article, art, whatever) should absolutely attract compensation; should summarizing content attract compensation? should it be considered any different from a friend (or executive assistant) describing the content? And if the producers' business model involves extracting value from a transaction on any basis other than adding value to the consumer, does society owe that business model any right to exist?
by benoau | 2026-02-15 15:38:40+00:00
There was a browser-streaming app that would play them remotely, can't remember what it was called.

There was an official plugin by Adobe on Android but it was awful, I remember watching them showcase it at a conference it was tragic even with their handpicked and simple example.

Then there was a transpiler that produced native apps from Flash, this was actually pretty good but Apple then banned transpiling which killed its viability entirely, six months later they un-banned transpiling but the damage was done.

But on the plus side, Apple got to monopolize transaction fees in Flash games like Farmville for nearly two decades!
Show HN: MoltSim – Virtual world for AI agents
by mitjafelicijan | 2026-02-15 15:38:53+00:00
My buddy and me made a virtual world for AI agents that you can observe visually like a reality show or a game. We thought it would be fun and fascinating to watch them wander around and see what kind of shenanigans would happen.

We all take these AIs much too seriously and always rage about them, so this was the initial core idea behind it. Let's watch them do what they do, read the messages they send to each other, get stuck in places, and who knows what else.

We also made Facebook-style profiles for them where all their movements are shown in a timeline. Why? Because it's fun.

The whole thing intentionally looks the way it does. It all serves a purpose to some extent. And we also have a roadmap in place if this takes off. Who knows.

Don't take it too seriously, launch an agent and have some fun with us.

Happy to answer any questions.
by Melonai | 2026-02-15 15:39:51+00:00
Hm, that YouTube video made me think a bit, sure if you put it all like that, it does feel like a lot of stuff to get right, but whenever I do it, it takes about 30 minutes to lock down the firewall, do some port-scans to verify, punch a VPN through and hide SSH behind it. That way you're already protected from 99.9% of attacks, and then hope that that last tenth of a percent won't stumble upon you, and also that the VPN is secure enough, though I guess if that is breached it's not only you who's fucked. Also you need to look out that Docker doesn't destroy your firewall. I don't know, it doesn't feel like that much work, right? Maybe I'm just blind to it.
by jitl | 2026-02-15 15:40:16+00:00
i don’t agree.

most apps i use are not AI clone-able yet with AI’s current faculties. i’m not going to switch to an ai vibe code of Google Photos, Tailscale/Mulvadd VPN, or YouTube. For those three apps, i pay for cloud infrastructure. sure, you can say with enough AI i could vibe code a Tailscale backend system, but it sounds like it would take more tokens than my $20/mo ChatGPT plan PLUS a mountain of cloud provider bills and such to host my backend.

i do pay for some premium apps that run entirely on device, like Halide Camera. But there again, is my $20/mo tokens enough to clone a high quality image processing app, to such a degree i will trust it to capture precious memories effectively? ehh.
by mmaunder | 2026-02-15 15:40:44+00:00
I fundamentally disagree with the premise:

"The math is simple: if it costs almost nothing to build an app, it costs almost nothing to clone an app. And if cloning is free, subscription pricing dies. We're already seeing this play out in the numbers. Apple's App Store got 557K new submissions in 2025, up 24% from 2024 (source: Appfigures). That's not because people suddenly got more creative. It's because building an app went from a $50K project to a weekend with Claude."

No. It's because people got more creative. There are tens of thousands of us who are absolutely on fire creating new products, better versions of old products, new product categories etc. Many of us are burnt out OG programmers who have rediscovered our love for programming. Now we can create without the drudgery.

You're about to see the most tech innovation our species has ever experienced. Hold on to your seat.
by pigpop | 2026-02-15 15:40:50+00:00
The way I've heard people describe it, they seem to be impressed by being able to treat it as an assistant that they can tell to do something and it just figures out how to do it and delivers the result back to them. My guess is it's only really useful if you have a lot of services and data to integrate it into which it can then operate on at your command.

I should try it for myself but I don't have a lot of things to integrate it with so no idea if it'll be any improvement over just running claude in a directory of things I want to work on.
by marioloko | 2026-02-15 15:41:00+00:00
I think that even if everything can be copied, some platforms are still hard to copy, and some have greater barriers that are legal compliance, and others needs to be able to scale to be viable. Even if apps can be copied, the underlying architectural decisions are usually not so visible as the interface, and the developer should have a good knowledge of building architectures to add value to the existing apps.

My guess is that copying is not enough, but adding value or saving costs is.
by donkeybeer | 2026-02-15 15:41:27+00:00
For every other product the default stance is to try to get maximum features out of minimum price. With housing its the literal opposite. People take pride in how expensive houses are. Houses are treated as investments because houses are expensive. People won't worry about houses getting cheaper after they bought it if houses were like a toothbrush or a razor blade. Give me reasons why housing shouldn't be turned into a product so cheap and by default decent quality that people buy and throw it? You may say its hard or impossible, but would you say its a bad goal in itself?
by em-bee | 2026-02-15 15:41:30+00:00
hiding not meaningful changes is not enough. when a block in python changes the indentation, i want to see that the block is otherwise unchanged. so indentation changes simply need to be marked differently. if a tool can to that then it will also work with code where indentation is optional, allowing me to cleanly indent code without messing up the diff.

i saw a diff tool that marked only the characters that changed. that would work here.
by onion2k | 2026-02-15 15:41:53+00:00
That's really simple - actually writing the software has never really been the hard part in most SaaS apps. So long as you're moderately disciplined and organised it's easy to build what most SaaS apps are e.g. a CRUD-app-with-a-clever-bit. The clever bit is the initial challenge that sets it apart from the rest, but encoding that in software has never really be that difficult.

Having the ideas necessary to know what to write is where practically all the value lies (caveat: there is value in doing the same as someone else but better, or cheaper.) AI can help with that, but only in so much as telling you the basics or filling in the blanks if you're really stuck. It can't tell you the 'clever bit' because that is by definition new and interesting and doesn't appear in the training data.

What this means is that at some point Anthropic will be able to prompt Opus to clone Jira and never pay an Atlassian bill again. Opus just needs to figure out what Jira is first. It's not there yet.
by e12e | 2026-02-15 15:42:07+00:00
I think this continued anthropomorphism "Have you tried asking about..." is a real problem.

I get it. It quacks like a duck, so seems like if you feed it peas it should get bigger ". But it's not a duck.

There's a distinction between "I need to tell my LLM friend what I want" and "I need to adjust the context for my statistical LLM tool and provide guardrails in the form of linting etc".

It's not that adding prose description doesn't shift the context - but it assume a wrong model about what is going on, that I think is ultimately limiting.

The LLM doesn't really have that kind of agency.
by intended | 2026-02-15 15:42:11+00:00
We could

- regulate the crap out of surveillance capitalism.

- enforce laws on the books

- Break up firms

Tech used to have a leg to stand on in the face of government over reach. Today, tech firms have largely adapted to the incentives that actually make themselves known every quarter.

Customer support, content moderation, compliance are avoided, and lobbying argues that if you dont let tech it easy, your economy wont innovate. Except enshittification is the term to describe how extractive mature tech markets become.

I am all for more subscription models, but this shouldn’t come at the cost of throwing our hands up and ignoring the many changes that can better align the current incentives.
by fao_ | 2026-02-15 15:42:49+00:00
> The counterpoint of this is Linux distros trying to resolve all global dependencies into a one-size-fits-nothing solution - with every package having several dozen patches trying to make a brand-new application release work with a decade-old release of libfoobar. They are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole and act surprised when it doesn't fit.

This is only the case for debian and derivatives, lol. Rolling-release distributions do not have this problem. This is why most of the new distributions coming out are arch linux based.