MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Did your client ever replace you by a more junior freelancer?
by goingbananas | 2026-02-24 14:40:56+00:00
I got a client for 3 years and out of the blue they picked a more junior freelancer and did not renew my contract. The problem is that my code and architecure were really good there, so much so that adding new functionality was extremelly easy (due to the well architected code). The client most likely wanted a confirmation that my job could be done cheaper, and the easy to maintain and extend code I wrote made him think so. So I was dropped. In the end I was out of a gig for doing really excellent work. Any similar experiences or hints?

PS: I was the only developer and the client can't code, so they can't distinguish between a spaguetti and properly developed code.
The client literally told me it was not due to performance. But that the work can be done by that other junior freelancer.
by Aachen | 2026-02-24 14:41:11+00:00
> This would provide an extra layer of protection

I think this might be the answer. There's no point to it by itself (either you separate data and code or you don't and let the user do anything to your page), but if you're already using a sanitiser and you can't use `textContent` because (such as with Markdown) there'll be HTML tags in the output, then this could be extra hardening. Thanks!
by StopDisinfo910 | 2026-02-24 14:41:30+00:00
I mean innovation going faster than security department is not a new thing.

You have to understand that the security department operates with a fundamentaly different mindset and reality than a business executive. One is responsible for compliance and avoiding adverse events and the other for ensuring the ongoing survival and relevance of the organisation.

Specific waivers for high level members are fully expected. They also have waivers for procurements. It makes sense because they can engage their personnal responsibility for this level of decisions. They don't need the security department to act as their shield.

It's clear that something like Open Claw has the potential to be deeply disruptive so seeing leaders exploring makes sense.
by bayindirh | 2026-02-24 14:41:45+00:00
Well, it's not always true.

Look at how the proposal for making netplan the default network manager in Debian went. Not good, from Canonical's perspective.

Making /tmp behave the way systemd guys want also went not according to plan. The behavior is modified somewhat because of the discussion.

Rust's influence doesn't come from Canonical per se, but from its promise to eradicate memory related bugs. The initial hype was off the charts, but it's coming down, and the shortcomings are becoming obvious.

Canonical is trying to affect Debian, that's true, but it's not always a given.
by starkience | 2026-02-24 14:41:56+00:00
We wrote a deeper technical breakdown of the architecture here: https://dev.to/akashneelesh/bring-bitcoin-to-your-app-now-in...

High-level architecture:
Accounts are smart contract wallets on Starknet
Fees are covered via a paymaster contract
It's meant for any builder, you don't have to be a blockchain expert to build with it.
Transactions are batched and submitted atomically, so you keep the UX of your existing app.
by llm_nerd | 2026-02-24 14:42:16+00:00
>It was no secret Twitter was running themselves to the ground

Elon has run a number of businesses into the ground. Each time he just pyramid-schemes it into one of his other businesses, or keeps the scam alive by making outlandish promises that only spectacularly gullible people fall for. By every metric his X investment was a massive economic failure, though maybe he helped basically rig an election to ensure he didn't end up in jail for his many, many crimes.

>According to Nikita they’re running X with 30 ppl

Is this to be impressive?

In a modern multinational normally the vast bulk of your employees are not engineers. They're sales, compliance, safety, accessibility, legal, and so on. Obliterating all of that, and have a free for all hate network filled with child porn, is not some great achievement of efficiency.
by keiferski | 2026-02-24 14:42:36+00:00
Murch actually expands on that a little more in the interview. He doesn't mean the specific activity is what your job should be, it's more like "the basic similar activity."

So for him, as a video editor, it was using a tape recorder to record sounds, and reorganize them in an aesthetically appealing way. He didn't actually get into video editing specifically until after college IIRC.
by scott_w | 2026-02-24 14:42:53+00:00
> For a disease which (to my knowledge) can’t be slowed down or reversed, I think it’s a fair question why we would want to detect Alzheimer’s. Maybe there are other reasons, but my suspicion is that we will be able to, and an easy detection method significantly widens the pool of subjects to study later on.

Your point at the end is essentially correct. There's a couple of reasons that come to my mind:

Early detection lets us test cures more quickly. You can see if the treatment is working without waiting 30 years for symptoms to develop or not. If prevention is all that works, we can verify lifestyle changes, again without having to wait 30 years for symptoms to develop.

Early detection means there's more of a chance of any future treatment succeeding and the patient returning to a normal life. Think of early detection of cancer or heart disease meaning you can be treated with less risky medication and procedures and minimise the damage being done.
by a_better_world | 2026-02-24 14:43:29+00:00
But if Musk actively identifies himself as a Nazi, how is that name-calling?

His family left Canada to move to South Africa because they were in leadership roles in the Canadian Nazi party.

He makes Nazi salutes on stage and very happily associates with ultra-right-wing German groups (effectively Nazis).

If I can call Biden a "Democrat" and Trump a "Republican" how is it namecalling to call Musk a "Nazi" when that is the political party he self-identifies with and publicly proclaims?

Maxdo, I appreciate your moral stance. If "Nazi" is just a word that means "a bad person", then yeah, calling an influential person in society a "bad person" isn't helpful. As you say, name-calling doesn't help.

However, as you also say, it is important to try to see the reality. Musk is a Nazi.
by fragmede | 2026-02-24 14:43:31+00:00
I don't know if you've heard, but there have been a large number of layoffs in the tech sector recently. Whether they're actually related to AI as executives claim, and not section 174 of the US IRS tax code in the BBB, is known only to them, but if your argument hinges on people having not been fired when there have been layoffs, you may need a different one.
by Spooky23 | 2026-02-24 14:43:58+00:00
Not really. Alzheimer's is about 60% of dementia, and is frequently misdiagnosed without a full workup. As primary care shifts to more poorly trained providers and doc in the box delivery models, you'll get less workups and more misdiagnoses.

A more objective blood test will make for more accurate diagnoses and and better treatment.
by saezbaldo | 2026-02-24 14:44:10+00:00
The thread illustrates a recurring pattern: encrypting the artifact instead of narrowing the authority.

An agent executing code in your environment has implicit access to anything that environment can reach at runtime. Encrypting .env moves the problem one print statement away.

The proxy approaches (Airut, OrcaBot) get closer because they move the trust boundary outside the agent's process. The agent holds a scoped reference that only resolves at a chokepoint you control.

But the real issue is what stephenr raised: why does the agent have ambient access at all? Usually because it inherited the developer's shell, env, and network. That's the actual problem. Not the file format.
by ctmnt | 2026-02-24 14:44:56+00:00
I think we're both right about zeroize. Added a reply to clarify. In short, yes, the key and password are getting zeroized, but not the actual secrets. Which seems like the thing that matters in this context, at least given the tool's stated aims.

OrcaBot: There's a lot there! Ambitious project. Cute name, who doesn't love orcas? I don't see anything screamingly bad, of the variety that would inspire me to write essays about random people's code.

Some thoughts: The line between dev mode and production is a bit thin and lightly enforced. Given the overall security approach, you could firm that up. The within-VM shared workspace undermines the isolated PTYs. If your rate-limiting middleware fails, you allow all requests through. `SECRETS_ENCRYPTION_KEY` is the one ring and it doesn't have any versioning or rotation mechanisms.

In general it seems like a good approach! But there are spots where one thing being misconfigured could blow the entire system open. I suggest taking a pass through it with that in mind. Good luck.
by zoeysmithe | 2026-02-24 14:45:05+00:00
He was shot in 1918 leaving bullets in his body and left him weakened, then in 1922 he suffered at least three debilitating strokes. He lost his ability so speak and had to learn to speak again. He even proposed assisted suicide because he was suffering so much. He then had a final fatal stroke in 1924. I don't think "he looks crazy so he must have had some STD" is medically accurate or remotely appropriate on what's supposed to be an academic forum. He most likely had brain damage towards the end thus his illness of course was reflected on his body looked. Lenin's eyes reflected his post-stroke damage.

He was quite sane in his life and his work expanding on Marx is of course extremely important.
by bayindirh | 2026-02-24 14:45:18+00:00
If we stop fighting for anything just because someone said it's long gone, we'd have nothing.

World's history has changed through wars where some people said that winning [said war] is impossible.

Nothing is set in stone. World is changing more drastically than ever. Assuming that we can't change things or things will stay a certain way is a funny fallacy, at best.

Permanence is an illusion. The pendulum is on the move. It might be moving in a way I don't like, but it can't continue like that forever. I'm just doing what I feel right. I'd rather die trying than regretting that I didn't try.
by xml | 2026-02-24 14:45:49+00:00
To put it into your metaphor: I am not advocating against the existence of bandsaws. I would just rather have bandsaws that do not cut off your fingers if you do not read a book about them first and make it difficult to sew the fingers back on, while requiring arcane incantations to do their work.

There are of course power tools with obnoxious protections that make them difficult to use, but since we are dealing with software here, we are not bound by the laws of physics. I believe that we can create a better tool that is both powerful and easy to use.
by derverstand | 2026-02-24 14:45:52+00:00
Fair point on the vertical integration. That’s definitely a real difference from the CPU era.

At the same time, I’m not fully convinced that owning the primitive automatically means owning most of the value on top of it in the long run.

Nvidia owns the GPU layer, but it doesn’t own the majority of the software built on top of GPUs. AWS owns infrastructure, but SaaS value still fragments heavily across vertical domains. Infrastructure providers often try to move up the stack, but specialization and domain depth tend to create space above them.

It’s possible that frontier labs will capture more horizontal value than chip companies ever did. But I’m not sure language-native compute completely collapses the stack. It might just reduce friction and lower the barrier for building vertical systems.

The interesting question to me is whether this really eliminates the ecosystem layer — or just reshapes it.
by TaupeRanger | 2026-02-24 14:46:21+00:00
More information is not always better for the patient. If you could detect the disease 5 years before symptoms began, there are certain psychological harms that come with that knowledge. These must be balanced against the things you mention about "slowing" the disease (unclear if any treatments do much for a given individual) and planning your future. You talk about quality of life, but quality of life declines the MOMENT you learn that you have a progressive, incurable, disease that will slowly rob you of your mind. It's not clear at all that knowing about your disease earlier is actually better for anyone.
by saberience | 2026-02-24 14:48:09+00:00
Would 1000% prefer to use Pi (https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono) for building anything relating to AI agents.

It's already battle-tested in super popular applications (like OpenClaw for example and many others), has 100s of extensions, is already built in a type-safe language, excellent community. And it also includes a full TUI and WebUI for interface support.

Also Pydantic is a VC backed business now trying to funnel people into using their paid cloud services. No thanks.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-02-24 14:48:30+00:00
There are all sorts of scenarios one could imagine .. maybe your neighbor works at the car wash and will drive your car there and meet you after you've walked there, etc, etc, but part of having human-level intelligence, which is what LLMs are striving for, is to be able to handle questions (more importantly real world ones, not just "gotcha" puzzles) in human-like fashion, and to have good enough "theory of mind" to read between the lines when someone asks a question, and understand that they've most likely included all relevant information that you would not automatically assume as part of the question.

The only good answers to the car wash questions are either a) "well, duh, drive, since you're gonna need your car there to wash it" (or just "drive", recognizing this as a logic/gotcha puzzle, with no explanation required), or b) "is there something you are not telling me here that makes walking, leaving your car at home, a viable option when the goal is to have your car at the car wash to wash it?".
by 3rodents | 2026-02-24 14:48:32+00:00
No. They’re not. Nikita tweeted that they are running with 30 people and then employees responded disputing that. The 30 number is full time people on the product team. The actual company is larger.

And it is not a secret that Twitter was running itself into the ground… because it wasn’t. Twitter was doing fine. Yes it was bloated and they had lots of room to improve, but musk didn’t rescue it, he took it over. Twitter would have been fine without musk.

Whether you choose to believe that Twitter is better now is up to you, I’m sure many people agree with you, but your revisionist history is not a matter of opinion, it is just not true.
by smyrgeorge | 2026-02-24 14:49:01+00:00
Freepath is an information network that requires no internet, no servers, and no central authority of any kind.

Instead of routing your messages through a data center, Freepath works the way stories and letters worked for thousands of years: person to person, device to device.

When two phones running Freepath come near each other — at a coffee shop, on a bus, at a concert — they automatically and silently exchange content. Posts, messages, updates. Things you wrote. Things people you trust wrote. The network is the crowd itself.

Your phone becomes a node. You become the infrastructure.
by saezbaldo | 2026-02-24 14:49:06+00:00
This is the under-discussed part. We spent decades building authorization layers around code deployment -- review gates, CI checks, staging, rollback. That infrastructure exists because code changes are high-consequence operations that compound.

"Code is cheap" means generation is cheap. But the authorization to ship it remains expensive for very good reason. Removing the generation bottleneck without replacing the judgment layer is a control gap, not a productivity gain.

The parallel is giving someone a master key because they're fast at opening doors. Speed was never the constraint that justified the lock.
by Aachen | 2026-02-24 14:49:06+00:00
Shouldn't use innerText anyway (nonstandard, worse performance, tries to parse the HTML and gives you unexpected behavior if e.g. a style is set that makes an element invisible but still has text inside, doesn't work on all DOM nodes...)

I can see how it's a way of allowing some tags like bold and italic without needing a library or some custom parser, but I didn't understand what the point of this default could be and so why it exists (a sibling comment proposed a plausible answer: hardening on top of another solution)

> Yes, because that's the default configuration, if you don't want that, stop using the default configuration?

"don't use it if it's not what you want" is perhaps the silliest possible answer to the question "what's the use-case for this"
by d--b | 2026-02-24 14:49:09+00:00
I just love everything about this.

I love that kids could be left alone in their home and would burn plastic over a gas stove to create models of roller coasters.

I love that Disney would respond to him and not even forget the typo in quadrupuler.

I love that he kept all that and thought of it as a foundational part of his personality (I think probably he was already like that)
by bayindirh | 2026-02-24 14:49:34+00:00
> If this was going to happen, it would have already happened. The pieces are all there already.

Same things were said for:

- Removal of DRM from music: Happened.
- Age verification in the internet: Happening.
- Locked down personal devices: Happened.
- Total surveillance in cities: Happened.
- Not being able to buy but only rent: Happened in many digital formats.
- Internet activation of software: Happened.
- Tracking individual persons real-time: Happened.
- Browser attestation: Google is trying hard.
- Attestation for Internet Banking: Reality in S. Korea.

etc. etc.
Show HN: DoNotify – Google Calendar reminders as phone calls(not notifications)
by micahele | 2026-02-24 14:49:42+00:00
I built DoNotify because I kept missing Google Calendar events. Telegram calls worked for v1, but they required the app and didn't reliably ring through Do Not Disturb.
So I rebuilt it around regular phone calls via Vonage's Voice API. When a Google Calendar event is due, DoNotify calls your phone number and speaks the event details aloud: title, time, location. No app needed. Rings through silent mode and DND. Works internationally.
Stack: Laravel, Livewire, Vonage Voice API, LemonSqueezy for billing. Google OAuth for calendar sync and sign-in. Resend for backup email reminders.
Recently added an API so you can trigger reminders programmatically from your own workflows. There's also an OpenClaw skill if you're into agent-based automation.
Would love feedback on the approach. The core bet is that voice calls are the only notification channel people physically can't ignore.

https://donotifys.com
by throw10920 | 2026-02-24 14:49:43+00:00
> But how many of those crashes not caused by inattention could have been avoided with less idiocy and more defensive driving?

Most of them.

We can lump together "inattention" and "idiocy" for the purposes of this conversation, because both could be massively alleviated by a good self-driving car without lidar.

If you look at the parallel comments, you'll see that the majority of accidents and fatalities indeed come from these two factors combined (two-thirds coming from distraction, speeding, and impaired driving), and that kube-system is having to resort to ridiculous fallacies to try to dispute the empirical data that is available.
by saezbaldo | 2026-02-24 14:50:05+00:00
Agree, and I'd add: the feedback loop between decision and consequence got dramatically shorter. You can test an architectural hypothesis in hours instead of weeks. That part is genuinely powerful.

But faster feedback also means bad decisions propagate faster. The skill isn't generating three implementations in parallel -- it's knowing which one won't page you at 3am. That judgment comes from having been paged at 3am enough times to recognize the patterns.
by vincentvandeth | 2026-02-24 14:50:09+00:00
Context bloat is a real problem — and yes, order matters more than most people realize. Descriptions near the top of the tool list get preferentially selected, especially in long contexts where attention degrades.

Two things I do to fight this:

First, skill scoping per task. Instead of exposing all 20+ skills to every agent, each terminal only sees the 3-5 skills relevant to its current dispatch. The orchestrator decides which skills to load before the agent even starts. Less noise, better selection accuracy.

Second, context rotation to prevent context rot setting in. When an agent's context fills up, the system automatically writes a structured handover, clears the window, and resumes in a fresh context. This is critical because a degraded context doesn't just pick worse tools — it starts ignoring instructions entirely. A fresh context with a good handover outperforms a bloated one every time.

I'm actually testing automatic refresh at 60-70% usage right now — not waiting until the window is nearly full, but rotating early to prevent context rot before it starts. Early results suggest that's the sweet spot: late enough that you've done meaningful work, early enough that the handover quality is still high.

The organic discovery problem you're describing is essentially unsolvable with a flat tool list. The more tools you add, the worse selection gets — it's not linear degradation, it's closer to exponential once you pass ~15-20 tools in context. The only path I've found is hierarchical: a routing layer that narrows the set before the agent sees it.
by paulgb | 2026-02-24 14:50:57+00:00
I remember following this at the time! FYI it was "shut down" (kept online but no further development) two years ago (https://x.com/KennethCassel/status/1620500575183073280)

> Decided to shutdown Diode. (For now the site is live, I'll likely open-source the code in case anyone wants to take the baton and run)

Kenneth is now working on RMFG (https://www.rmfg.com/)
by ninkendo | 2026-02-24 14:51:06+00:00
> but that's just as true of C

Right, that's the whole point of this thread. The only stable ABI rust has is one where you can only use C's features at the boundaries. It would be really nice if that wasn't the case (ie. if you could express "real" rust types at a stable ABI boundary.)

As OP said, "I don't think deflecting by saying "but C is no safer" is super interesting". People seem intent on steering that conversation that way anyway, I guess.
by consumer451 | 2026-02-24 14:51:14+00:00
I it is quite interesting that, according to a generally reliable YouTuber, Australian age verification was pushed by an ad agency whose major clients were upset about upcoming legislation regulating online gambling. It was a very successful distraction.

> Australia's Social Media Ban is a Win for Gambling Companies

https://www.patreon.com/posts/146315894 (supporting links and transcript)

https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/12/12/pro-teen-social-media-b... (the smoking gun)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJi6N_6RmtU