MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chasd00 | 2026-02-04 22:21:54+00:00
That situation makes sense but then i have to ask why hasn't it been done already? Software developers are not rare and if the use case is so isolated and discreet then surely it would have been tried by now. Even without genAI, CRUD, RDBMS record management, SSO, row level security... none of those things are new or out of reach until now. I think what you'll find is when you sit down with the users and start asking about the parts of the exiting system they actually need you'll never get agreement nor a clear answer. When/if you finally get a set of requirements and after UAT sign-off and then after go-live the users will say "this isn't what i meant" and you're back to square one. Rinse/repeat for years and then one day an exec will say "why are we wasting all this time, let's just subscribe to an OTS saas and make them configure it to meet our needs".
Ask HN: Where does operational truth live before it reaches "systems of record"?
by former-aws | 2026-02-04 22:22:13+00:00
I’m trying to pressure-test a pattern I keep seeing in industrial and asset-heavy operations, and I’d value perspectives from people who’ve lived this.

In many environments (manufacturing, equipment rental, oilfield services, aerospace, medical devices), quality and ops work often starts outside formal systems:
- inspection notes written by hand
- photos on phones
- voice notes from the field
- emails and spreadsheets coordinating fixes

ERP/QMS systems exist, but under time pressure the work happens elsewhere first. When an audit, customer escalation, or safety question hits, teams scramble to reconstruct what actually happened from scattered artifacts.

A few questions I’m genuinely curious about:
- Have you seen environments where this doesn’t happen? What made them different?
- Where does reconstruction pain show up the most — audits, customer disputes, asset recertification, something else?
- What information tends to get lost when work is summarized or normalized too early?
- Who usually carries the burden of “proving” things are fine when something escalates?

I’m not selling anything or looking to promote a tool. I am just trying to understand where reality breaks abstraction in practice.

Would appreciate any firsthand experiences or counterexamples.
by kyboren | 2026-02-04 22:22:17+00:00
> how do we explain how so many votes are unanimous when, on the day of the vote, some regents express opposing views?

That reminds me of the Politburo voting scene in The Death of Stalin. Small group politics at their finest.

Anyway, the UC Board of Regents is full of political hacks and corrupt cronies. Diane Feinstein's husband was famously a regent, while simultaneously serving as Chairman of both CBRE and his own leveraged buyout private equity firm.
by agentzed | 2026-02-04 22:23:16+00:00
It is something that will or will not happen on an individual level.

You are fools to think you personally are a part of or will be present at the zenith of human ascendancy.

One, all, and the world will go on as though another day. Those who become or go beyond their “full self” will merely have a new level. Like a base conversion.

Besides, there are notes of singularities flitting in and out of your very minds. You get the the bottom of those and you will find whichever part is yours will come by your acquiring it for yourself.

The singularium will be your own place in the ascendency of Man, through technology or personal development. The self is the ultimate technology.
by jiggawatts | 2026-02-04 22:23:43+00:00
My example is lighting technology:

Wood fires were the only option for something like a few hundred thousand years.

Oil lamps for millennia.

Tallow or beeswax candles are modern technology, appearing after the fall of the Roman Empire.

Gas lighting was widespread for less than a century.

Incandescent lightbulbs for another century, but were starting to get replaced by fluorescent tubes just decades later.

Cold cathode fluorescents saw mainstream use for about two decades.

LEDs completely displaced almost all previous forms of lighting in less than a decade.

I recently read about a new form of lighting developed and commercialised in just a few of years: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adf3737
by GZGavinZhao | 2026-02-04 22:23:53+00:00
reMarkable just open-source your display drivers and E-ink render stack please. I'm pretty sure the pressure curve issue can be solved just by tuning a few parameters in the code. I appreciate reMarkable for adhering to GPL and giving us trivial root access to the machines, but while you're there I really don't see why you don't just do it fully.

Even with the limited amount of usability, the community has already made some amazing additions, for example KOReader. Imagine how far we'd get if we can just write any app we want for reMarkable. I would completely get a typefolio and ditch my laptop if I have the ability to *easily* write my own app on the reMarkable without going through the loops of binary patching and other quirks.
by littlecranky67 | 2026-02-04 22:24:01+00:00
That is a chicken and egg problem. Look at argentina pre Miley, when the dollar/peso exchange rate was fixed and you couldn't freely exchange. People would still prefer the dollar over the peso, even though you couldn't legally agree on dollar prices in contracts such as rentals. So people were using the dollar to save in, and exchange for peso when they needed to exchange goods.

My point being, you can have two competing currencies and exchange between them. In Argentinas case, the currency competition was healthy as politicians couldn't conceal their bad financial policies due to the hyper inflated exchange rate for pesos.
by Terr_ | 2026-02-04 22:24:05+00:00
> the Kurzweilian version of singularity

Cynical take: Kurzweil's predictions follow a predictable pattern which suggests something about how and why they are being generated.

Namely, it's whatever increasingly-improbable new advances and discoveries are needed to ensure achieve practical immortality is achieved just in time for a particular human named Ray Kurzweil to escape the icy grip of death.
by timhh | 2026-02-04 22:24:08+00:00
> just a little to different and obscure

Even the style of writing screams "I'm doing something weird and I'm not going to explain it to you unless you are already a mega-fan". Reminds me of Wolfram's writing a bit. He's created a world that only he is in and then writes about it in detail as if everyone else is there too.
by tayo42 | 2026-02-04 22:24:29+00:00
> I didn't want CC to SSH into a prod machine from where it is running locally (real problem!). I wanted to lock down the tools it can run to be only on sandboxes while also giving it autonomy to create sandboxes and not have access to anything else.

This is already the modern way to run infra. If your running simple apps, why are you even spinning up vms? Container running platforms make this so easy.
by kace91 | 2026-02-04 22:24:36+00:00
>The output of code isn't just the code itself, it's the product. The code is a means to an end.

I’ll bite. Is this person manually testing everything that one would regularly unit test? Or writing black box tests that he does know are correct because of being manually written?

If not, you’re not reviewing the product either. If yes, it’s less time consuming to actually read and test the damn code
by pixelready | 2026-02-04 22:24:41+00:00
There’s really two types of people that tend to be drawn to libertarianism at some point: humanists and narcissists.

Those who are fundamentally humanist want to tear down systems of oppression because it pains them to see their fellow humans abused and brought low by corrupt laws and regulations. They (perhaps naively) imagine that if the system was dismantled or at least shrunk to minimum size, basic human decency will step in to fill the vacuum and people will thrive. Folks like Penn Gillette are the face of this group.

The narcissists are drawn to the movement because they feel like “if only everyone would get out of my way, I can do GREAT THINGS™ “. They like ideas like social Darwinism because they are already privileged enough to not be worried about losing in a survival of the fittest contest, and don’t tend to concern themselves with the second order effects of dismantling the system because it is simply an immoral impediment to their greatness. Peter Thiel and folks like him are the face of this group. This is largely the strain that has taken root in SV.
by CuriouslyC | 2026-02-04 22:25:01+00:00
I have such mixed feelings about Anthropic. Opus 4.5 is legit, Claude Code has been making solid progress (but it's gonna get stomped by pi) and they've been trying to be more transparent. On the other hand, they still infra issues, they till haven't open sourced Claude Code and they're going after other harnesses that use their sub. Dario also seems to have a very paternalistic attitude that I don't like, though I don't think that will survive the market.
by angiolillo | 2026-02-04 22:25:10+00:00
> Cataloguing your fridge requires taking pictures of everything you add and remove which seems... tedious. Just remember what you have?

I agree that removing items and taking pictures takes more effort than it saves, but I would use a simpler solution if one existed because it turns out I cannot remember what we have. When my partner goes to the store I get periodic text messages from them asking how much X we have and to check I look in the fridge or pantry in the kitchen and then go downstairs to the fridge or pantry in the basement.

> Can you not prepare for the next day by opening your calendar?

In the morning I typically check my work calendar, my personal calendar, the shared family calendar, and the kids' various school calendars. It would be convenient to have these aggregated. (Copying events or sending new events to all of the calendars works well until I forget and one slips through the cracks...)

> If you have reminders for everything (responding to texts, buying gloves, whatever else is not important to you), don't you just push the problem of notification overload to reminder overload?

Yes, this is the problem I have. This doesn't look like a suitable solution for me, but I understand the need.
by spacedcowboy | 2026-02-04 22:25:14+00:00
I’ve written about this before …

I have no mind's eye, and I definitely consider it an advantage. I genuinely thought it was a euphemism until I was about 20, drunk, and surrounded by friends at college, playing a game in the student bar and the "mind's eye" thing came up. They couldn't believe I was serious. I couldn't believe they were serious... For a while at least.

My mind works on rules, not imagery. If I am asked to "not think of an elephant in a room", I (of course) immediately think of an elephant in a room, but it's not a visual picture - it's relationships between room and elephant (does it touch the walls, the space around it, does it press the light-switch on, can the door open if it opens inwards, ...) It's the concept of an elephant in a room. There's no visual.

Similarly, I don't know my right from my left - instead I have a rule in my head that I run through virtually instantaneously "I write with my right". That then distinguishes for me which is which. If someone gives me directions "first right, second left, right by the pub and next right" I run through that rule for the first instance, and then I have the concept of "not-right" for the "second left" bit. It gets "cached" for a while, and then drops out.

So where's the advantage ? I can consciously build these rules up into complicated (well, more complicated than people expect) structures of relationships and "work them". It's not like running an orrery backwards and forwards, but it's the best analogy I can give. I can see boundary conditions and faults well before others do - and often several complex states away from the starting conditions. I'm often called into meetings just to "run this by you" because I can see issues further down the line than most. I'm still subject to garbage-in-garbage-out, but it's still something of a super-power.

I'm told I sort of gaze into the middle distance, and then I blink, come back, and say something like "the fromble will interact with the gizmo if the grabbet conflicts with the womble during second-stage init when the moon is waning". Someone goes off and writes a test and almost all the time (hey, I'm human) I'm correct.
Mental modelling is what I gain from a lack of visualisation. I think of it as literally building castles in the sky, except the sky isn't spatial, it's relational.
by Paracompact | 2026-02-04 22:25:25+00:00
"Fairly straightforward" is incorrect. Not an authority to describe in more detail, but the most tricky blocker I'm aware of are these proprietary "MakerNote" tags from camera manufacturers, which are (often undocumented) binary blobs. exiftool might not even know what's in there, let alone how to safely remove it without corrupting the file.
by kakacik | 2026-02-04 22:25:36+00:00
Not so much if you think about if from security point of view of our ancestors. Those 1-2s if we talk about proper yaw you are defenseless and clueless, its actually pretty dangerous during say high speed drive on tightly packed highway (as in every single car in all lanes goes too fast to handle any major driver's mistake). But its great for equalizing pressure in ear via eustach tube without the need to block & blow your nose, something both mountaineers/paragliders and divers are well aware of.

Same goes for sneezing, actually that's even worse for driving, I literally don't see anything for a second at least. Sometimes can be blocked, sometimes not so much.
by Zigurd | 2026-02-04 22:25:39+00:00
Population is a particularly good example: just decades ago it seemed like we were barreling toward an overpopulation crisis. I'm aware that some people think we're beyond the carrying capacity of the Earth long-term. But there seems to be a broad consensus that birth rates are declining everywhere without a food crisis or other immediately visible calamity.

Population appears to be on a droopy S curve. The preposterousness of those space data centers and the fact that we don't have a theory of consciousness makes it seem plausible that AI could also not continue to rocket ahead.
Show HN: We simulated 10K freelancers deciding to work for AI agents
by Mert_Predicts | 2026-02-04 22:25:51+00:00
Inspired by the "Rent a Human" discussion - AI agents hiring humans directly.

Instead of hot takes, we simulated it:
- 10,000 synthetic personas (Gen Z to Boomers)
- Each with personality traits, income, pain points
- 30-day decision simulation

Results:

Day 1: 58% said "NEVER"
Day 30: 34% signed up

Biggest flip: Gen Z (42% never → 67% signed up)
Most resistant: Boomers (92% still refused)

Top turning points:
1. Instant payment (8 sec crypto vs Net-60 invoices)
2. Zero scope creep
3. No unpaid "strategy calls"
4. No client politics

Key insight: Human boss pain > AI dystopia fear

The personas are interviewable - you can ask any of them "why did you change your mind?" and they respond in character based on their profile.

Built with: Python, FastAPI, OpenAI, React, Three.js for 3D visualization

Happy to discuss methodology or findings.
by black3r | 2026-02-04 22:25:53+00:00
My experience is similar, but I feel I'm actually thinking way harder than I ever was before LLMs.

Before LLMs once I was done with the design choices as you mention them - risks, constraints, technical debt, alternatives, possibilities, ... I cooked up a plan, and with that plan, I could write the code without having to think hard. Actually writing code was relaxing for me, and I feel like I need some relax between hard thinking sessions.

Nowadays we leave the code writing to LLMs because they do it way faster than a human could, but then have to think hard to check if the code LLM wrote satisfies the requirements.

Also reviewing junior developers' PRs became harder with them using LLMs. Juniors powered by AI are more ambitious and more careless. AI often suggests complicated code the juniors themselves don't understand and they just see that it works and commit it. Sometimes it suggests new library dependencies juniors wouldn't think of themselves, and of course it's the senior's role to decide whether the dependency is warranted and worthy of being included. Average PR length also increased. And juniors are working way faster with AI so we spend more time doing PR reviews.

I feel like my whole work somehow from both sides collapsed to reviewing code = from one side the code that my AI writes, from the other side the code that juniors' AI wrote, the amount of which has increased. And even though I like reviewing code, it feels like the hardest part of my profession and I liked it more when it was balanced with tasks which required less thinking...
by antirez | 2026-02-04 22:26:16+00:00
Disappointing how this lacks a clear reference implementation, if not mixed at almost yet unreleased VLLM (nightly version) stuff. I'm ok with Open Weights being a form of OSS in the case of models, because frankly I don't believe that, for large LLMs, it is feasible to release the training data, all the orchestration stuff, and so forth. But it can't be: here are the weights, we partnered with VLLM for inference. Come on. Open Weights must mean that you put me in a situation to write an implementation easily for any hardware.

p.s. even the demo uses a remote server via websocket.
by dragonwriter | 2026-02-04 22:26:24+00:00
> To be clear, I'm suggesting that any specific format for "skills.md" is a red herring, and all you need to do is provide the LLM with good clear documentation.

Agent Skills isn't a spec for how information is presented to the model, its a spec whose consumer is the model harness, which might present information made available to it in the format to the model in different ways for different harnesses, or even in the same harness for different models or tasks, considering things like the number and size of the skill(s) available, the size of the model context, the purpose of the harness (is it for a narrow purpose agent where some of the skills are central to that purpose?), and user preference settings.

The site itself has two different main styles of integration for harnesses described ("tool based" and "filesystem based"), but those are more of a starting point for implementers that an exhaustive listing.

The idea is that skill authors don't need to know or care how the harness is presenting the information to the model.
by akudha | 2026-02-04 22:26:41+00:00
It is very time consuming, tiring and takes effort to do principled shopping. For most people, convenience and price are more important than principles. I can’t think of many (any?) big companies that I’d be happy to give my money to, they all behave badly - only question is the degree to which each one behaves badly.

This isn’t complaining, just pointing out the reality - we actually don’t have as many options as we think we do. If one has extra money, they can spend a little more and shop at smaller but expensive places, most people are going to shop at Walmart or Amazon
by trixyf | 2026-02-04 22:26:47+00:00
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada (PT)

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, React, Node.js, SQL, Docker, AWS, Terraform

Email: tfb.fab@gmail.com

Résumé/CV: https://trixy-fabrigar.tiiny.site

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/trixy-f

Github: https://github.com/t-fb

I’m a full-stack developer with several years of experience in the JavaScript ecosystem, with additional experience integrating AI technologies into web applications. Recently, I co-created Burrow (burrow-io.github.io ), an open-source data ingestion pipeline for AI systems.
Show HN: Cohesix 0.4.0-alpha, a no-std control-plane OS
by Cohesix | 2026-02-04 22:27:06+00:00
I became increasingly frustrated with control planes that were easy to assemble but hard to audit. The convenience of open-source stacks doesn’t compose with compliance - because every extra daemon and API becomes another surface to explain, version, and defend.

I built Cohesix 0.4.0-alpha to treat compliance and security as a systems problem. It is a control-plane OS for edge GPU nodes, running as an seL4 VM, and it exposes a Secure9P namespace instead of a traditional filesystem or RPC layer.

The heresy is deliberate. The VM userspace is no_std, no POSIX, no traditional filesystem, no in‑VM RPC, and no background daemons. The interface is a small, explicit grammar: file‑shaped control surfaces under a Secure9P namespace.

This is not minimalism for its own sake. It is about determinism, auditability, revocation, bounded behavior, and making failure modes legible. Tickets and leases expire; budgets return ELIMIT instead of mystery latency; /proc exposes queue and lease state.

A deployment is a hive: a queen role orchestrates worker‑heart and worker‑gpu roles, and NineDoor exports paths like /queen/ctl, /proc, /log, and /worker/<id>/telemetry. Operators attach with ‘cohsh’ over an authenticated TCP console; that console is the only in‑VM listener.

Cohesix does not try to replace Linux, Kubernetes, CUDA, or existing OSS. Heavy ecosystems stay on the host, and host‑side tools and sidecars mirror them into /gpu and /host, so adoption can happen without rewrites. It is a control‑plane boundary, not a workload plane.

In 0.4.0‑alpha I added authoritative scheduling/lease/export/policy control files with /proc observability, plus a REST gateway that projects the same file semantics over HTTP. QEMU aarch64/virt is the dev target today; UEFI ARM64 is the intended hardware target.

If you want a general‑purpose OS, this is the wrong tool. I wanted something boring on purpose, small but deceptively powerful, and I was willing to sacrifice convenience to regain control.
by Nevermark | 2026-02-04 22:28:07+00:00
I have noticed a pattern where one thing that is not understood gets tied to another thing that is not understood, one perceived mystery to another, one unsolved problem to another, one misunderstanding with another, and then this is declared to be an answer.

Quantum mechanics and consciousness.

Pyramids and aliens.

Looking forward, it is a great opportunity for random mashup "explanations". The urge will be great for some people.
by kingnothing | 2026-02-04 22:28:59+00:00
It's always a game of cat and mouse, but NSO had a quarter billion USD in annual revenue in 2020. They are clearly providing highly effective spyware to governments around the world. It wouldn't surprise me if they have that many zero day, zero click exploits that they can always get in to a phone. We're talking nation state espionage here... they probably have insiders at Apple and Google who introduce subtle unnoticeable bugs in core OS stacks.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2026-02-04 22:29:04+00:00
Which law is broken by holding up a sign on the sidewalk, not obstructing traffic, and shouting?

Which law is broken by telling people that masked, armed thugs (maybe ICE, maybe not, impossible to tell) are assaulting people in the area?

Which law is broken by recording and reporting on those masked, armed thugs who are assaulting and killing lawful protestors and other innocent civilians?

Which local, city, or state official deputized Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement to be legal Law Enforcers of local, city, or state traffic laws? The 10th amendment places this outside federal jurisdiction.

I'll do some pre-work for you -- this law mentions a crime only if there is "assault", which does not include protesting, community engagement, and journalism: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/111

This is likely why there has been so few convictions for this protected activity, and why the administration is instead resorting to secret enemies lists, warrant-less kidnappings, uncountable unaccountable assaults, and summary executions.