MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kianN | 2026-02-17 00:10:08+00:00
Yeah Show HN has a pretty interesting distribution compared to standard posts due to the long-term visibility on the Show page. The odds of a Show HN post breaking 10 points is significantly higher than an average post, but of the posts that clear 10 points, I recall the likelihood of breaking 100 points to be similar to a regular post.

As a sidenote: That clock is so cool: I was just mesmerized for multiple minutes!
by lotsofpulp | 2026-02-17 00:10:27+00:00
> you literally cannot discern anything of value from a one-time viewing of them.

The goal is not to discern anything about a particular person from a one-time viewing of them, the goal is to discern something about a person a sufficiently high percentage of the time. Hence the evolutionary utility of using prior probabilities.

As history, and probably many people’s personal experiences, have shown, this trait also has drawbacks.
by w10-1 | 2026-02-17 00:11:09+00:00
It's not intelligence, respect, signaling or status.

It's saving time, the thing we can't bank or stretch or keep. Doing that reflects value priorities that are likely to lead to success and happiness.

We would all be this brief if we weren't constrained otherwise. People who care deeply about their time are this brief even if they shouldn't be. You can even say nothing in ways that influence others in the ways you want (from spiritual teachers and parents to politicians and mafia dons).

(Wealth and power trashing is all too easy these days. Pick a hard target?)
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-17 00:11:24+00:00
Well done! Have you uploaded these scans to the Internet Archive? If not, please consider doing so.

https://help.archive.org/help/uploading-a-basic-guide/

https://help.archive.org/help/managing-and-editing-your-item...

Trail Crew Stories and Mountain Gazette might also be interested in this.

https://www.trailcrewstories.com/

https://mountaingazette.com/
by mikeyfrilot | 2026-02-17 00:11:45+00:00
Dogfooded the full weekly workflow and merged the output as a real PR:

PR: https://github.com/mcp-tool-shop/mcp-tool-shop/pull/2

Trust receipt: 8 artifacts SHA-256 hashed, tied to commit 43fa469. I ran all 10 generators twice to verify deterministic output — identical results excluding timestamps.

Example outputs (real, not mocked): https://github.com/mcp-tool-shop/mcp-tool-shop/tree/main/doc...
by andix | 2026-02-17 00:11:54+00:00
I think there are generally 3 kinds of skills:

1. only information and instructions on how to answer
2. some defined actions (run specific cli commands for specific tasks, use this api with those parameters)
3. skills including scripts

1 seems to be of limited use

2 and 3 can save the agent quite some time for finding a solution. And once the agent found a programmatic solution to a specific problem, they can store this information in a skill
by nilkn | 2026-02-17 00:11:56+00:00
"Signaling" is just the information that your visible choices send to those around you, including strangers. That's why it's called "signaling" -- your choices are broadcasting an information signal about you to others.

To not signal, you must make choices that carry little or no information in the context in which they exist. If you make choices in a context in which they are abnormal (e.g., dressing very casually in a context that others can't access in similar clothing), they inherently broadcast unique information about you. In some cases, that information can create a complex side effect in how people perceive you, even if you don't intend it (e.g., "this person put in the absolute bare minimum effort, because they knew we'd have to be nice to them no matter what, which feels disrespectful to me; their lack of optional effort for others signals that they only care about themselves, not us").
by mikeyfrilot | 2026-02-17 00:12:18+00:00
Why build this? Rankings are easy. Governance is the part that rots.

promo-kit makes "what changed / why promoted / what's frozen" verifiable:

- drift = entrants, exits, score changes week-over-week
- freeze = pause automation, humans review before resuming
- receipts = SHA-256 hashed inputs tied to git commits
- automation = opens PRs, humans merge — never pushes to main

Zero dependencies, Node 22+, ESM-only. Quickstart is two commands: npx promo-kit init && npx promo-kit selftest
by jerlam | 2026-02-17 00:12:33+00:00
Bluetooth (and wifi) aren't turned off at all through the Control Center - they changed the wording to say "disconnected", meaning that your phone only disconnects from known devices. But both are still turned on for other purposes such as CarPlay, Handoff, and Location Services (via wifi). For the purposes of this discussion, they are potentially still transmitting a known identifier.

Apple reconnects to known devices and networks at 5am:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102412

Bluetooth and Wi-Fi Aren't Fully Disabled When Off in iOS 11 Control Center

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15297387 (2017, 143 comments)
by jijji | 2026-02-17 00:12:43+00:00
to avoid these conditions i have usually inserted a row into a lock table used for this purpose to create a lock with a unique key for that row with a few minute timer, the once the transaction is complete it will delete the lock row. This way, simultaneous users will only get the first lock, all other requests would fail, and then if the timer expired, we would assume the transaction never completed and it could try again after a few minutes
by svpyk | 2026-02-17 00:15:48+00:00
Would it really become a bottleneck ? Only if we force a human in the loop when it may not be really necessary.

If there are well defined contracts for the software, and the software behaves correctly, is it really necessary for understanding the code entirely ? We seem to develop on many abstractions already ignoring how the code actually executes on the hardware without any issues.

Secondly, wouldn't AI help in understanding the codebase and make that easier as well ? Debugging must also immensely benefit from AI assisted tools.

So i'm less concerned overall with the auto-generated code as long as the code thats landing is reviewed by an AI bot that's aggressively prompting to ensure the code is as simple as it could be.
by user3939382 | 2026-02-17 00:16:13+00:00
tell me more about your evidence of united states soldiers landing in ukraine and killing/capturing the existing government to replace it

We have the phone recordings of our government picking the new government BEFORE the coup. What part of that don’t you understand?

So saddam hussein started the second iraq-america war?
Don't answer that.

Whatever your counterpoint is here it’s so weak I don’t even know what it is. Using the military to kill civilians in Eastern Ukraine was definitely the start of the war, you can save the attempt at cleverness.
by YaraDori | 2026-02-17 00:16:14+00:00
Creator here. SkillForge watches what you do on screen and turns it into structured SKILL.md files that AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, etc.) can use. Instead of writing long instruction docs, you just demonstrate the workflow and SkillForge captures it as a reusable skill. Built for the growing ecosystem of AI agents that consume markdown-based skills. Would love feedback from anyone working with AI coding assistants.
by simon666 | 2026-02-17 00:16:46+00:00
Yeah similarly we can make a few distinctions here:
1) Intended signal, true
2) Unintended signal, but true
3) Unintended signal, but false
(Sure, 1' intended but false; though not really important here)

When (1) obtains we can describe this situation as one where sender and received coordinate on a message.

When (2) obtains we can say the sender acted in a way that indicative of some fact or other and the received is recognizes this; (2) can obtain when one obtains as a separate signal or when the sender hasn't intended to send a signal.

(3) obtains when the receiver attributes to the sender some expressive behavior or information that is inaccurate, say, because an interpretive schema has characterized the sender and the coding system incorrectly producing an interpretation that is false.
by turnsout | 2026-02-17 00:18:04+00:00
Absolutely. This is why I'm hesitant to go full "dark software factory" and try to build agent loops that iterate in YOLO mode without my input. I spent a day last week iterating Skills on a project by giving it the same high-level task and then pausing it when it went off the rails, self-reflect, and update its Skill. It almost took me out of the loop, but I still had to be there to clear up some misunderstandings and apply some common sense and judgment.
by NenadVasic | 2026-02-17 00:18:57+00:00
Solo dev, Montenegro. Building an open protocol for cryptographically validating digital work — designed to run on a $30 phone offline or across interplanetary delays.

What exists and runs today:

- Layer 1 (Python) — Local validation with CRYSTALS-Dilithium3 + SPHINCS+ (FIPS 204/205). SHA3-256 hashing, SQLite-backed DAG. 50 tests. Identity generation in 2ms, file validation
in 1-2ms. MIT licensed. https://github.com/navigatorbuilds/elara-layer1
- Layer 1.5 (Rust) — DAM Virtual Machine with PyO3 bindings. Same crypto via liboqs, byte-identical wire format to Python. 5-tuple dimensional addressing, tiled storage, in-memory
DAG index, 9 DAM operations, parallel batch verify via rayon. 72 Rust + 21 cross-language tests. Wire format serialization in 292ns. https://github.com/navigatorbuilds/elara-runtime
- Layer 3 (Python, MCP server) — Persistent cognitive architecture for AI assistants. Memory, emotional modeling, episodic recall, autonomous reasoning, dream processing. 39 tools,
~26K lines. On PyPI: pip install elara-core. https://github.com/navigatorbuilds/elara-core

What's specified but not built:

- Layer 2 (network consensus via Adaptive Witness Consensus)
- Native hardware (custom silicon where the 5D mesh maps to physical substrates — PCM for time, memristive crossbar for concurrency, photonic mesh for zones). This is a long-term
vision, not a promise. The protocol runs indefinitely on commodity hardware.

The data structure is a Directed Acyclic Mesh (DAM) — a DAG extended with 5 dimensions: time, concurrency, zone topology, classification projection, and AI analysis. No blockchain.
No universal clock. The minimum viable network is one device.

Crypto: Post-quantum from genesis. Dilithium3 + SPHINCS+ dual signatures. No classical crypto to migrate away from later.

Honest limitations: Layer 2 consensus is specified but unimplemented. The formal Byzantine proof is pending. ZKP layer uses classical elliptic curves in Phase 1 (migration path to
lattice-based ZKPs defined but years away). Hardware whitepaper is speculative engineering — none of it is needed for the protocol to work.

US provisional patent filed (63/983,064). Whitepapers OTS-timestamped on Bitcoin.

Happy to answer technical questions about the DAM structure, the PQC choices, or why I think the mesh model works better than a chain for this problem.
by insane_dreamer | 2026-02-17 00:19:48+00:00
The human response would probably have been "where is your car now?".

Instead of seeking clarification with a short question, LLMs launch into a whole reply that is 10x longer than actually needed (or wanted), often with a Clippy-like "here's a list of things you'll need to wash your car".

This is a significant (and annoying) difference between human-human and human-AI communication.
by tptacek | 2026-02-17 00:20:40+00:00
I think this is more interesting as a rubric than as a prediction. I agree with some of it and not with others; I don't know if we're "cooked" or not; I do like how they've broken vertical software's moats down though.

1. I don't buy that chat interfaces will replacing existing user interfaces. I'm in particular a little bit familiar with Bloomberg's user culture. I don't know that I buy that it's going to be replaced with LLM chat prompts. But software agents are going to make faithfully reproducing those existing user interfaces much easier, so: half credit?

2. Half credit again on LLMs vaporizing the "business logic" moat, because the vertical-specific rules that justified the original software market are I think a lot harder to encode in Markdown than the 1 week they gave it, and also verification becomes a bear as more ground-truth business logic is replaced with nondeterministic AI output. There's a thing happening here for sure, I just don't buy it's as decisive as they say.

3. Public data access: I 100% buy this. If this was a real moat, it's dead.

4. Talent scarcity: same deal. Remember, we're talking about vertical software, where the underlying technical work is fairly repetitive and best-practices driven; it's the exact slice of software development work LLMs excel at.

5. Bundling (you get IB messaging along with your charting and your news service); maybe. This point feels tautological. Work out what LLMs do to each of the bundled experiences and there's your answer for how resilient that moat is.

6. Proprietary data: I think they're just dead on right here, and it does indeed seem to be a good time to be a company like Bloomberg?

7. Regs lock-in: half credit, because AI does make regs compliance a lot easier, and I think we're at the very early stages of seeing how.

8. Network effects seems like a repetition of "bundling" and if I have a qualm about this rubric it's that they made it look like an even 10, so they could have clean wins and losses.

9. Transaction embedding (ie, being a payment processor or a loan originator) also seems tautological; it's a moat, sure, but they're begging the question of whether AI enables people to stand up viable competitors.

10. I think "system of record" and "transaction embedding" are kind of the same moat.

I wish people would not blog on X (I will call it X when it's used as a crappy blog platform); these ASCII charts are awful. But that's neither here nor &c.
by WalterBright | 2026-02-17 00:20:52+00:00
Would you go to a wedding dressed like a slob? Would you go to an elegant restaurant in sweats? If you go to pick up your date, and she opens the door wearing track shorts and a worn t-shirt, how would you feel?

When I'd pick up my date, and she had obviously spent a lot of time on her appearance, it'd make me feel like a million bucks.
Show HN: Tilth v0.4.1 – 29% cheaper Sonnet, 22% on Opus (benchmark: 114 runs)
by jahala | 2026-02-17 00:22:04+00:00
Smart code reading for humans and AI agents. Tilth is what happens when you give ripgrep, tree-sitter, and cat a shared brain.

--

v0.4.0 added search ranking, sibling surfacing, transitive callees, cognitive load stripping, smart truncation, and bloom filters. Got -17% on Sonnet, -20% on Opus.

v0.4.1 was pure instruction tuning — zero code changes that alone jumped Sonnet adoption from 89% to 98% and $ cost/correct answer from -17% to -29%.

The instruction tuning result surprised me. The model already knew tilth tools existed — it just wasn’t choosing them consistently. Making the replacement relationship explicit in the tool description was worth more than all the search ranking work in v0.4.0.

Haiku remains the outlier — only 42% tilth adoption despite instruction tuning.

--

https://github.com/jahala/tilth/

Full results: https://github.com/jahala/tilth/blob/main/benchmark/README.m...

--
PS: I dont have the budget to run the benchmark a lot (especially with Opus), so if any token whales has capacity to run some benchmarks, please feel free to PR results.
Show HN: Envref – separating secrets from config in .env files
by xcke | 2026-02-17 00:22:09+00:00
I wanted to test how far Claude Code (Opus 4.6) could go building a real CLI tool autonomously — not just scaffolding, but the full thing: CLI, backends, parser, tests, fuzz tests, docs, and a documentation site.

The result is envref, a tool that replaces secret values in .env files with ref:// URIs pointing to where the secret actually lives:

# .env — safe to commit
APP_NAME=my-app
DATABASE_URL=ref://secrets/database_url
API_KEY=ref://secrets/api_key

Config stays inline. Secrets stay in your OS keychain (or another backend). envref resolve merges them back together at runtime.

It plugs into direnv, so resolution happens automatically when you cd into a project. The resolve pipeline is optimized for <50ms with 100 variables to keep cd snappy.

Seven backend types: OS keychain (macOS/Linux/Windows — zero setup), a local encrypted vault (age + SQLite, for headless/CI), 1Password, AWS SSM, HashiCorp Vault, OCI Vault,
and a plugin protocol for anything else.

It also does layered .env merging with profiles, variable interpolation, schema validation, a doctor command that scans for common .env issues, and `envref run` to inject
resolved vars into a subprocess.

The experiment: Single Go binary, built across 77 autonomous agent iterations — ~192M tokens, $170 in API cost, 8 hours 41 minutes of compute time. I defined the goal, set up
an agent loop with a backlog, and let it run. Happy to answer questions about that process.

The tool itself may be useful, but treat it as beta.

GitHub: https://github.com/xcke/envref
Site: https://xcke.github.io/envref
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-17 00:24:03+00:00
First thing I heard about it too, apparently docker has VMs now?

> Each agent runs inside a dedicated microVM with a version of your development environment and only your project workspace mounted in. Agents can install packages, modify configs, and run Docker. Your host stays untouched. - https://www.docker.com/products/docker-sandboxes/

I'd assume they were just "more secure containers" but seems like something else, that can in itself start it's own containers?
by bts89 | 2026-02-17 00:24:05+00:00
500 is the target, not a hard requirement. The current SP500 index is comprised of 503 constituents.

I’m also pretty sure S&P doesn’t maintain a ‘S&P 500 Software & Services Index‘.

There is a ‘S&P Software & Services Select Industry Index’ with 140 constituents. That’s probably the index in question.
by ctmnt | 2026-02-17 00:24:09+00:00
Sadly, I feel like it’s too mature. If you’re used to contemporary development environments, Lazarus feels like a clunky throwback. I say that with lots of love and respect for the Lazarus team and community. Delphi’s even worse. Working in VSCode is... fine. For such a beautiful language, the ecosystem has really fallen behind the times.
by ClayShentrup | 2026-02-17 00:24:26+00:00
LOL, people get it just fine. fargo adopted it by a 64% supermajority and st louis adopted it by a 68% supermajority.

https://approval.vote/

> You can explain to me until you're blue in the face why approval is strictly better even in this situation, but I am emotionally attached to my vote counting for Bernie more than any other candidate, so reason isn't going to work on my lizard brain.

but your actual strategy is to rank hillary in 1st because bernie can't win. or, in the case of my aunt, she preferred warren but voted biden to beat trump. she would have ranked them biden>warren>trump in a ranked election for that very reason. this is called "compromise strategy".

bro, approving both of them is better than being strategically forced to say that you prefer clinton to bernie or biden to warren.
by gruez | 2026-02-17 00:24:27+00:00
>There are no penalties for leaking users' data. Bad PR? Oh please, it won't hurt a company which is already universally hated.

Unlike credit bureaus (also hated), there's no moat for KYC providers. All you need is some AI model + humans to do the verification, and away you go. At best there's some compliance costs for soc2 or whatever, but not too pricey compared to the cost of a few programmers. There's definitely penalties for leaks/bad PR, as seen by discord cutting relationships with providers that turned out to have leaked data, or for Persona, seemingly bad PR.
by shagie | 2026-02-17 00:25:01+00:00
I recall from my early days of reading the jargon file... maybe DWIM? http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/D/DWIM.html (that said, someone who used that version would have many gray hairs... I was reading about this back in the early 90s).

Warren Teitelman originally wrote DWIM to fix his typos and spelling errors, so it was somewhat idiosyncratic to his style, and would often make hash of anyone else's typos if they were stylistically different. Some victims of DWIM thus claimed that the acronym stood for ‘Damn Warren’s Infernal Machine!'.

In one notorious incident, Warren added a DWIM feature to the command interpreter used at Xerox PARC. One day another hacker there typed delete *$ to free up some disk space. (The editor there named backup files by appending $ to the original file name, so he was trying to delete any backup files left over from old editing sessions.) It happened that there weren't any editor backup files, so DWIM helpfully reported *$ not found, assuming you meant 'delete *'. It then started to delete all the files on the disk! The hacker managed to stop it with a Vulcan nerve pinch after only a half dozen or so files were lost.

The disgruntled victim later said he had been sorely tempted to go to Warren's office, tie Warren down in his chair in front of his workstation, and then type delete *$ twice.

DWIM is often suggested in jest as a desired feature for a complex program; it is also occasionally described as the single instruction the ideal computer would have. Back when proofs of program correctness were in vogue, there were also jokes about DWIMC (Do What I Mean, Correctly). A related term, more often seen as a verb, is DTRT (Do The Right Thing); see Right Thing.
by WalterBright | 2026-02-17 00:25:40+00:00
Decent people don't need a code of conduct.

There's been pressure on the D Language Foundation to have a CoC. I've consistently refused one. The only thing I demand is "professional conduct". Sometimes people ask me what professional conduct is. I reply with:

1. ask your mother

2. failing that, I recommend Emily Post's book on Business Etiquette.

And an amazing thing happened. Everyone in the D forums behaves professionally. Every once in a while someone new will test this, their posts get deleted, and then they leave or behave professionally.
by troad | 2026-02-17 00:26:06+00:00
There's so much nonsense going on in the UK lately that it seems worthwhile to start hosting public interest information like this off-shore, in the US.

A non-commercial initiative hosted by a group of Americans who wish to promote the cause of free information, but are themselves not interested in travelling to the UK, would be relatively immune to overreach by the British state. A US based service could take benefit of the First Amendment, the SPEECH Act, the fair use provision in US copyright law, etc - and simply ignore all the numerous British 'suppression orders', 'cessation notices', 'online safety' laws, etc.

If the Internet is indeed balkanizing - as sadly appears to be the case - let's squeeze some silver linings out of it.
by walterbell | 2026-02-17 00:26:41+00:00
Abstract excerpt

> We provide systematic evidence on the economic damages from espionage to US firms and industries.. revenues and R&D expenditures at targeted firms decline by roughly 40% within five years.. exports in targeted sectors decline by 60% over a decade.. espionage has clear economic harms to targeted firms and US industry, but firms are puzzlingly unresponsive in how they manage innovation.