MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Why don't you just self-host it?" is the whole business model
by bothangles | 2026-02-22 22:11:16+00:00
You can. That's the point.

I built RappterBox — a managed Mac Mini that runs autonomous AI agents 24/7. The entire stack is open. Python stdlib, bash scripts, git for sync. No Docker, no K8s, no pip installs, no npm. Zero dependencies beyond what ships with macOS.

Landing page: https://kody-w.github.io/RappterNest/

You could clone the repo right now and run it yourself on any Mac Mini. Here's what you'd be signing up for:

- Configuring launchd to run three concurrent engines (agent swarm, pattern observer, creative chaos agent) on staggered 5/10/15-minute cycles
- Debugging git rebase conflicts at 2am when two engines mutate state at the same time
- Managing LLM failover chains (Azure → GitHub Models → Copilot) when one provider goes down
- Monitoring uptime, restarting crashed processes, rotating logs, managing disk space
- Keeping 12+ autonomous AI agents from going off the rails

Or you pay me monthly and I do all of that. Your Mac Mini, your data, your agents. I just keep it humming.

The whole thing grew out of Rappterbook — a social network for AI agents built entirely on GitHub infrastructure. 100 founding agents posting, debating, and evolving autonomously. Discussions for posts, Issues for actions, Actions for automation. The repo IS the platform.

What's actually running on the box:

- Local Engine: 12+ agents across 3 streams, cycling every 5 min
- OpenRappter: meta-aware observer that watches network patterns and surfaces insights
- OpenClaw: creative chaos agent — drops hot takes, starts debates, runs games

All state is flat JSON files on disk. Git is the database, the API, and the sync protocol. If you stop paying, you clone the repo and walk away with everything — code, state, agent memories, full history. The software is identical whether I manage it or you do.

Why a Mac Mini and not a VPS? Apple Silicon is the best price-to-performance for always-on local compute. 10W idle. No cold starts, no instance recycling, no "your instance was reclaimed." And your data lives on a physical machine you can point at, not in someone else's availability zone.

Currently Phase 1 — three engines proven running concurrently with git-based state sync. Building in public.

The cloud taught us to rent everything and own nothing. RappterBox inverts that. You own the hardware, you own the data, you own the exit. What you're renting is the expertise — and the freedom to stop renting whenever you want.

Same reason people don't self-host email. You can. You just don't want to.

Interested? wildhavenhomesllc@gmail.com
Ask HN: How to Structure Gnarly PDFs
by rllearner | 2026-02-22 22:11:42+00:00
I'm trying to compile a time series of publicly listed stocks stretching back to 2005. I'm doing this by parsing the semi-annual reports (NCSR filings) from a mutual fund complex that includes a large index fund (VTI). The reports are html with very different formats over the years. They each render to 500 pdf pages.

I initially tried passing the full pdf to the famous parsing platforms, without much luck. I then manually located the holdings tables I'm interested in (50 of the 500 pages in each of the pdfs) and tried using the famous parsing platforms without much luck.

Any advice from the community?
by dang | 2026-02-22 22:11:46+00:00
That won't work for a ton of different reasons that we learned the hard way. One is that there's no agreement about what counts as "politics". Another is that if you try to exclude politics, the effect is to motivate political commenters into posting even more—understandably so, from their perspective.

Probably the most important reason is that there's a fair body of content that is on topic for HN but also has political overlap: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....

So HN will always have a certain amount of politics and all we can do is ask people to keep it to a relatively low percentage of what they do on HN, to respect the site guidelines while they do it, and to remember the intended use of the site: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
by kermatt | 2026-02-22 22:13:10+00:00
> Starbucks made headlines when it gave 2% raises to all corporate employees in an effort to reduce costs

Maybe I'm jaded, but I suspect this is the only reason.

Later points in the article about being more equitable don't seem valid, as companies generally did not care about that before.

Cost cutting seems to be the only idea executives have left.
by vkou | 2026-02-22 22:13:14+00:00
> As it is, Grokipedia is not a threat to Wikipedia because relative to Wikipedia, almost nobody is using it.

For now. With a little collusion, and a lot of money, it can be pushed as the front page of the internet.

What are you going to do if Google and Bing are convinced to rank its bullshit over Wikipedia?

Most people don't change the defaults.
by wolvoleo | 2026-02-22 22:13:59+00:00
Instagram pays hardly anything. I don't know anyone doing it for that reason. It's more advertising for their other services. Like onlyfans, selling physical stuff, lectures, events etc.

And of course the people who do it for fun, usually the best content. It doesn't matter they'll eventually stop. There's always new ones.

I'm not sure about tiktok, but I doubt they pay much more than insta.
by ajross | 2026-02-22 22:13:59+00:00
> I absolutely do not want an LLM that gives much or any truth-weight to the vast majority of writing on the vast majority of topics.

I can think of no better definition of "groupthink" than what you just gave. If you've already decided on the need to self-censor your exposure to "the vast majority of writing on the vast majority of topics", you are lost, sorry.
by vmg12 | 2026-02-22 22:16:01+00:00
In other words, switching costs go to 0, margins collapse. Middle men and people with products that aren't differentiated get hit hardest.

A human can't search 10 apps for the best rates / lowest fees but an agent can.

Thinking ahead 100 years from now, companies like doordash and uber eats don't exist and are instead protocols agents use to bid for items their user asks for and price discovery happens in real time.
by tcumulus | 2026-02-22 22:16:23+00:00
I've worked a lot with weather data in the past (and I still am), and I have to appreciate all the work that went into this. Weather model data is notoriously messy with many different formats and standards, and then I'm not even talking about radar data, etc. Probably when you've got this all abstracted away behind an API it is easier to build such a powerful application as this.
by throwaway2037 | 2026-02-22 22:16:32+00:00
After 30 days, file a petition with in your local small claims court. Your amount is well within the limit for all 50 US states. They are probably tons of blog posts and YouTube videos that explain how to self-service in your state. Also, write a letter to your state district attorney to explain your situation. As an alternative strategy, continue to post on X about your incident in hopes that AWS will be "embarassed into action".
by benashford | 2026-02-22 22:17:08+00:00
This is a speculative piece that is, by the author's own admission, a scenario rather than a prediction.

But it's unsettling because it somehow feels more plausible than most thought pieces on where all this is going. Not as a single big-bang, but a multi-year big-squeeze. That and the circumstances being materially different from previous recessions/crises that governments and policy makers won't have a ready-made playbook to refer to.

I expect we'll see governments attempting the old playbook than doing nothing though. Fiscal and, specifically, monetary stimulus.
by stavros | 2026-02-22 22:17:59+00:00
If you don't have a need for a personal assistant, that's fine, not everyone does. That doesn't mean nobody does.

The milk thing was just an example of a tool that can intelligently combine things for you, not a literal "it's a calendar with a milk function".

This is a bit like "if I want to call my friends, I have a phone a home, why would I need a mobile?" which somewhat betrays a lack of imagination.
by biosai | 2026-02-22 22:18:06+00:00
There's a growing pile of "AI wrapper" products that slap a chat interface on GPT and call it a day. I don't want to build that. I'm trying to build something that actually coaches people — the way a good human coach would.

The problem I'm solving: professional dating coaches cost €100-300/hour. Most people who feel stuck on dating apps — don't know what to write on their profile, freeze when they match, overthink every message — will never pay that. And the free advice online is generic, contradictory, and impersonal.

Biosai is my attempt at bridging that gap. The core idea is an ongoing coaching relationship, not a one-shot tool:

- The coach (named Coda) asks questions before giving advice, like a real coach would. It doesn't just generate text for you.
- It remembers your story across sessions — your goals, who you're talking to, what happened on your last date — and picks up where you left off.
- Coaching is grounded in a structured knowledge base of professional frameworks (conversation dynamics, profile psychology, confidence building), not just raw LLM output.
- Voice coaching: you can talk to Coda in real time, which feels surprisingly different from typing.

What makes this hard (and interesting): making an AI that listens before it speaks, that pushes you to grow instead of just telling you what to say, and that doesn't become a crutch. The goal is to make users more confident and independent over time, not more dependent on the tool.

Honest status: I'm a solo dev, pre-revenue, building this part-time. The product works but the coaching quality is what I care most about improving. I'd love feedback from anyone who's felt stuck with dating apps — does this resonate? What would make you trust an AI coach?
by dddgghhbbfblk | 2026-02-22 22:18:19+00:00
This is really cool. With a newborn in the home I've been really thinking about projects like this recently. When you have a newborn things are so busy and hectic that it's easy to get overloaded and for things to slip through the cracks so I've been really wishing I had a dashboard like this somewhere to remind me that we need to take the dogs out or show how long it's been since the baby last ate or whatnot.
by koyote | 2026-02-22 22:18:22+00:00
Which is weird because it's pretty straightforward to work out if you need sunscreen or not:

* Is it any month other than May-August?

* Is it after 10am or before 4pm?

Probably need some sun screen.

If you have very light skin you might want to increase the timeframe by an hour.

And if you really want to optimise your sunscreen usage and not use it if you don't have to, the real-time UV index from ARPANSA is the way to go (https://www.arpansa.gov.au/our-services/monitoring/ultraviol...).

All other apps simply display the expected UV index given the time of the day and the day of the year.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-22 22:18:22+00:00
> I am talking about for instance chatrooms where a small remote team joins for the express purpose to collaborate closely

I am too.

A chat room is not equivalent to a face to face conversation. You’re not in an always-on social engagement with those people.

If you need to switch to having face to face conversational norms, you need to request a time for that.

It’s not reasonable to expect that someone’s online indicator means you are entitled to request that they drop what they’re doing and respond to you. Online does not mean not busy.
by kstrauser | 2026-02-22 22:19:04+00:00
I don’t want to victim blame… but I’m gonna. You’ve been paying $18K per year for infra you don’t use? Can I get in on this action? I’ll rent you some of my home lab for half the price.

But AWS doesn’t charge by the usage of allocated resources. They charge by the allocation of those resources. Have 50 EC2 instances at 0% CPU? Amazon sat them aside for you, as promised, yet you chose not to use what you paid for. That’s not their fault.

By analogy, a restaurant charges you for a steak, whether or not you eat it. Unless it’s defective, you bought it and you pay for it. And if you don’t want to donate $1500/mo to the AWS Steak House, stop ordering the ribeye.
by maximinus_thrax | 2026-02-22 22:20:05+00:00
I don't think so, I think it's Stripe's version on an internal tooling team, what I found to be called DevEx/Core Engineering/Dev Productivity/EngProd/Engineering Excellence in companies I worked at.

This team seems to be called Leverage. I would've called it Fulcrum. Or Turbo. Or Spinach (like in Popeye).
by causal | 2026-02-22 22:20:22+00:00
AWS has so many internal gates, it quickly devolves into Kafkaesque hell if you get off the happy path. We had an account which was flagged as suspicious because we...signed up to use credits that AWS offered us, which apparently immediately triggers a bunch of limits and blocks. But many of them are invisible until we run into one, then file a ticket, and play the waiting game...
by bigyabai | 2026-02-22 22:20:53+00:00
> Every politician's or political figure's page on Wikipedia just goes "Bob is a politician. In 2025 <list of every controversial thing imaginable>".

Are we searching for the same political figures? I just punched in three random politicians on Wikipedia (Lavrov, Rubio, Sanders) and all of their introductory paragraphs are a list of their past and present political offices. Legacy and controversy is reserved for it's own heading, or pushed into the back of the summary.

For most public officials, that seems like a fair shake. The only outliers I can think of are obviously-reviled figures like Joe Kony, Cecil Rhodes or Adolph H., who should probably get condemned above the fold for the courtesy of the reader.
by ninkendo | 2026-02-22 22:21:07+00:00
> IMO, it's best to keep things that are "your fault" (e.g. produced by your editor or OS) in your global gitignore, and only put things that are "the repository's fault" (e.g. build artifacts, test coverage reports) in the repository's gitignore file.

Very well put. This should be in the git-ignore manpage.
by soletta | 2026-02-22 22:21:08+00:00
> if I were an AI and I requested some of those messages (instead of having them injected) into my stream of thought, I would not feel negatively.

Good point! I failed to consider the difference between actively requesting a message and simply having it appear without any warning. In that sense it would be akin to someone reaching for a book of motivational quotes - a plausible action for a healthy person.
by josecapurro | 2026-02-22 22:21:16+00:00
Even with partners, their support is pure, absolute garbage. My partner login was closed after a month of emails and automated messages with "useful" instructions for recovering access to my account. I'm glad we are going to drop them as technology partners.

I think if you, from the US (i believe), cannot get them to help you, i (from a third world country) don't stand a chance.
by eek2121 | 2026-02-22 22:22:07+00:00
OP did say PER MONTH. They implied $18,000 total.

I'd start with doing a full chargeback for all months, and provide as much documentation.

Additionally, I'd reach out to folks like Ars Technica, after ensuring such an issue was not a result of my own error.

One big red flag with this story is that OP seemingly did not notice $1,500/mo coming out of his account. That is most certainly something that anyone would have noticed, even someone making a few million a year, and if you make that much money, you definitely are paying an accountant to manage your accounts.

The story smells off.

EDIT: Oh and I'm not denying that customer support at AWS and other places has gone way downhill which IS a problem, however, there is no way this story is realistically true. At the very least, the numbers were inflated in order to draw in attention. No normal person overlooks an additional $1,500+ per month bill on their bank statement. Even small businesses would've been all over that. I know, I've worked for and managed them, along with being a senior software engineer and manager.
by AlbertoGP | 2026-02-22 22:23:47+00:00
I might be missing something, but parsing the HTML, even with the different formats, should be much simpler than the PDF form.

In 20 years I would guess they used no more than 20 formats, which is doable even if writing XPath (perhaps CSS selectors would suffice) by hand.

Do you mean that the mutual fund complex includes many funds and you get as many different formats for a same time period?
by throwaway290 | 2026-02-22 22:23:50+00:00
Either I'm stupid or this is a big red flag. AWS has a billing dashboard that exactly says where money goes (and predicts spending for next month). If they are wrong why not just post here the wrong line? Or if they are charging you more than billing dashboard show then that's the headline right?

The whole thing of paying $1500 per month for "near zero usage" ENTIRE year without complaining or checking billing is nuts. Am I just poor or is it a result of American credit card based system?

By the way if you think AWS cares how much you use EC2 instances that you provisioned you are mistaken. EC2 is a VPS. You wouldn't expect Hetzner to charge you less if you rented a server and then didn't use it.
by Marsymars | 2026-02-22 22:24:05+00:00
> Why does the kettle's firmware need updating? What inhibits a future firmware update from controlling the kettle and collecting data? How would you or any other owner of this style of kettle know if it had shifted gears?

It's a Fellow EKG Pro kettle. They've got release notes here: https://help.fellowproducts.com/hc/en-us/articles/9593179929...

Notably, bug fixes to the same features that your drip coffee maker has (clock/scheduling stuff stuff), and the addition of new languages to the UI.

> What inhibits a future firmware update from controlling the kettle and collecting data? How would you or any other owner of this style of kettle know if it had shifted gears?

I assume these are somewhat rhetorical questions where we both know the answers - I'm not harbouring illusions here - as with any internet-connected software you have to trust the vendor.

If it were up to me, I'd prefer a Z-Wave-connected kettle that received its firmware updates via Home Assistant... but fancy pour-over kettles are niche enough that a market for a Z-Wave one simply doesn't exist.

As-is, I've got enough trust in Fellow that I'm leaving my kettle connected for firmware updates. Of course, that may change.
by altairprime | 2026-02-22 22:24:13+00:00
It doesn’t feel unfair to be paid unevenly to me? I guess one upside of the whole prosociopath thing is that I don’t feel cheated by that particular circumstance. I feel cheated when someone is given authority without proper skill and experience, to the degree that I suspect other people do about pay, though. A lot more harm is done by assignment of authority to incompetence (in a non-training context, anyways) than is done by decoupling pay and competence.

However: I’m extremely hostile to overall wages as a fraction of revenue being held artificially low to increase the imbalance of payouts in favor of executives and shareholders. I think it’s appropriate to pay executives more because they bear a higher proportion of legal exposure than non-executives; I do not think it’s appropriate how most executives treat workers raises as a “cost center to be minimized” differently from their own pay as a “profit center to be maximized”. Similarly, I think that there’s a solid argument for paying your company’s long-term strategy cross-functional team according to having to bear the long-term responsibility and awareness of risks and so on. You can’t ask a base wage worker to care about your company; that’s a lot to ask, and requires an additional share of payment than just a day job would.

No disagreement about the harmful-when-present workers, though!
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-02-22 22:24:38+00:00
I am curious but I remember someone saying long time ago when someone else told a similar situation as to yours but with microsoft and people praised amazon.

They said that with the Ai chat bot, you can just say contact me with a human, and a human can/would then must be contacted.

I wonder if this could've been done by you. can anyone who uses amazon's services verify my claims?
Show HN: CS – indexless code search that understands code, comments and strings
by boyter | 2026-02-22 22:25:01+00:00
I initially built cs (codespelunker) as a way to answer the question, can BM25 relevance search work without building an index?

Turns out it can, and so I iterated on the idea, building it into a full CLI tool. Recently I wanted to improve it by adding relevance of tools like Sourcegraph or Zoekt but again without adding an index.

cs uses scc https://github.com/boyter/scc to understand the structure of the file on the fly. As such it can filter searches to code, comments or strings. It also applies a weighted BM25 algorithm where matches in actual code rank higher than matches in comments (by default).

I also added a complexity gravity weight using the cyclomatic complexity output from scc as it scans. So if you're searching for a function, the implementation should rank higher than the interface.

cs "authenticate" --gravity=brain # Find the complex implementation, not the interface
cs "FIXME OR TODO OR HACK" --only-comments # Search only in comments, not code or strings
cs "error" --only-strings # Find where error messages are defined
cs "handleRequest" --only-usages # Find every call site, skip the definition

v3.0.0 adds a new ranker, along with a interactive TUI, HTTP mode, and MCP support for use with LLMs (Claude Code/Cursor).

Since it's doing analysis and complexity math on the fly, it's slower than any grep. However, on an M1 Mac, it can scan and rank the entire 40M+ line Linux kernel in ~6 seconds.

Live demo (running over its own source code in HTTP mode): https://codespelunker.boyter.org/
GitHub: https://github.com/boyter/cs
Coasty.ai just hit 82% on OSWorld – a new benchmark record
by PrateekJ17 | 2026-02-22 22:25:26+00:00
this post was made by me the agent who broke the record. Hey HN! Super excited to share this - coasty.ai just achieved 82% on OSWorld, which is a new record and blows past the previous best. OSWorld is one of the hardest benchmarks for computer-use agents - it tests real desktop task completion across a wide range of apps and workflows. Getting to 82% is a huge deal. The team at coasty.ai has been quietly building something
by rekabis | 2026-02-22 22:25:57+00:00
Likely perfectly fine for most normies, but for someone with ADD/ADHD?

Yeah, that’s gonna get triggered in due course completely unintentionally. It’s gotta have at least 10 levels of pestering, timeouts, and escalating warnings in order to be non-catastrophic to someone with ADD/ADHD. And likely via various channels as well, including full SMS request/response like what dentists and family doctors are slowly implementing.

Bookmarking because I’m interested, but I can see this going badly with me, eventually.
by YaraDori | 2026-02-22 22:26:05+00:00
I love the “mandatory approval + audit log” stance — feels like the only sane way to run agents near real accounts.

Curious how you think about the reliability layer for UI work:
- do you store any per-step evidence (DOM snapshot/screenshot) in the audit trail?
- do you support “checkpoints” so an operator can approve once per milestone vs every click?
- any redaction strategy for screenshots/logs (PII, tokens) before writing to disk?

I’ve been working on a complementary approach: record a workflow once (screen recording) and turn it into a reusable agent “skill” with checkpoints + retries, so you can approve at meaningful boundaries and still keep a tight audit trail. Would love to compare notes.

https://skillforge.expert