MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sublinear | 2026-02-08 07:50:55+00:00
Sure it is. I haven't made discussion impossible. If you choose to reply to my line of discussion, I eliminated an entire category of what I think are trivial arguments that miss the point (yes, my opinion). You found room for something else by claiming I have yet more opinions. In fact, I also asked some questions you chose not to answer.

That all begs some more questions: what about my statements isn't factual? What about your statements isn't factual?

I have a few guesses. You may think AI can write a better compiler. You may think AI has already written a better compiler. You may think humans shouldn't write code anymore.

All of those are examples of opinions you might declare, but maybe you meant to say something factual.
by Someone | 2026-02-08 07:52:22+00:00
> I'm confused at what speculative fiction exists from before the 1910s (or thereabouts) which involves FTL?

I bet very little. We didn’t really know how enormous the universe is (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_parallax: “Being very difficult to measure, only about 60 stellar parallaxes had been obtained by the end of the 19th century”), and we hadn’t known for long that the speed of light is an absolute speed limit.
by Zakodiac | 2026-02-08 07:53:12+00:00
Using SDK client libraries as the compatibility target is the right call - it keeps the whole AI-assisted development loop honest instead of just generating code that fakes happy paths.

Slack being harder than G-Suite tracks. The real-time stuff (websockets, event subscriptions, rate limiting quirks) is a completely different problem than REST APIs with predictable request/response flows.

I've been building something adjacent to this actually - a multi-protocol mock server called mockd (https://github.com/getmockd/mockd). Different angle than DTU - instead of cloning specific services, it runs real protocol servers (gRPC, REST, websockets, MQTT, etc.) that return controlled responses. The idea is you define your mocks across protocols and it serves them with state support, so you can build up a comprehensive mock of something like Slack's API surface from one tool. Longer term the plan is community templates so people can share and build on each other's setups. Still cleaning things up but would be curious what you think if you get a chance to look.

The Go to Rust rewrite is interesting - was that driven by performance or more about the ecosystem/tooling for this kind of work?
by yhoiseth | 2026-02-08 07:53:12+00:00
> Far better to let the company be punished for its failings, so it can (slowly, slowly) adjust, or be replaced by companies that operate better.

Well, if the company is replaced due to lack of heroes, doesn’t this mean that it actually needs heroes?

The industry as a whole might not need them, and it may be bad for individual heroes (though I think it’s more nuanced than that), but it seems to me like any particular company might need them.
by Joel_Mckay | 2026-02-08 07:53:50+00:00
Good Sci-fi is hard to write, as it is too easy to fall for silly plot devices, gimmicks, and tired clichés.

Space cowboys were replaced with thinly veiled dogma, meaningless cycles of ritualized tribal violence, and cheap nostalgic production grifts. Those that write about speculative Futures, are almost always talking about the present worlds flaws.

Anyone can publish now, and people simply stopped asking if they should. =3
by bubblethink | 2026-02-08 07:53:55+00:00
Good use case and an example of brokenness of UX on Linux in many small and subtle ways. It frustrates me to no end that GNOME, Nautilus, etc. will truncate or hide information in many places. I don't think this has been fixed but the launcher will truncate names with ellipsis. So analyzer will appear as "anal..."
by mcintyre1994 | 2026-02-08 07:54:18+00:00
I don’t think there’s any solution to what SimonW calls the lethal trifecta with it, so I’d say that’s still pretty impossible.

I saw on The Verve that they partnered with the company that repeatedly disclosed security vulnerabilities to try to make skills more secure though which is interesting: https://openclaw.ai/blog/virustotal-partnership

I’m guessing most of that malware was really obvious, people just weren’t looking, so it’s probably found a lot. But I also suspect it’s essentially impossible to actually reliably find malware in LLM skills by using an LLM.
by whilenot-dev | 2026-02-08 07:54:20+00:00
Care to elaborate?

I have showdead set to yes, and while so some articles get a gray color and an occasionally [flagged] tag, everything is still searchable[0]. The only form of censorship is the ordering in the news list, but I could pick any other list[1] if I wanted to.

[0]: https://hn.algolia.com/

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/lists
by yellow_lead | 2026-02-08 07:54:40+00:00
> My productivity did improve, but for any given task, I still had to jump into the project, set up the environment, open my editor and Claude Code terminal. I was still the operator; the only difference was that instead of typing code manually, I was typing intent into a chat box.

> Then OpenClaw came along, and everything changed.

> After a few rounds of practice, I found that I could completely step away from the programming environment and handle an entire project’s development, testing, deployment, launch, and usage—all through chatting on my phone.

So, with Claude Code, you're stuck typing in a chat box. Now, with OpenClaw, you can type in a chat box on your phone? This is exciting and revolutionary.
by ares623 | 2026-02-08 07:55:38+00:00
I've been thinking in a similar space lately, about how a "parallel web" could look like.

One of my (admittedly half baked) ideas was a vouching similar with real world or physical incentives. Basically signing up requires someone vouching, similar to this one where there is actual physical interaction between the two. But I want to take it even further -- when you signup your real life details are "escrowed" in the system (somehow), and when you do something bad enough for a permaban+, you will get doxxed.
by cadamsdotcom | 2026-02-08 07:56:04+00:00
> The underspecification forces the model to guess the data model, edge cases, error behavior, security posture, performance tradeoffs in your program

It’s guessing using the entire sum total of its ingested knowledge, and, it’s reasonable to assume frontier labs are investing heavily into creating and purchasing synthetic & higher quality data.

Judgment is a byproduct of having seen a great many things, only some of which work, and being able to apply that in context.

For most purposes (granted not all) it won’t matter which of the many possible programs you get - as long as it’s usable and does the task, it’ll be fine.
by noodletheworld | 2026-02-08 07:56:20+00:00
> what's much better is having THE AGENT come up with end to end test scenarios

There is no difference between an agent writing playwright tests and writing unit tests.

End-to-end tests ARE TESTS.

You can call them 'scenarios'; but.. waves arms wildly in the air like a crazy person those are tests. They're tests. They assert behavior. That's what a test is.

It's a test.

Your 'levels of accuracy' are:

1. <-- no tests
2. <-- llm critic multi-pass on generated output
3. <-- the agent uses non-model tooling (lint, compilers) to self correct
4. <-- the agent writes tests
5. <-- the agent writes end-to-end tests
6. <-- a human does the testing

Now, all of these are totally irrelevant to your point other than 4 and 5.

> I can empirically show...

Then show it.

I don't believe you can demonstrate a meaningful difference between (4) and (5).

The point I've made has not misunderstood your point.

There is no meaningful difference between having an agent write 'scenario' end-to-end tests, and writing unit tests.

It doesn't matter if the scenario tests are in cypress, or playwright, or just a text file that you give to an LLM with a browser MCP.

It's a test. It's written by an agent.

/shrug
by mixermachine | 2026-02-08 07:56:21+00:00
Nothing will come close to Opus 4.6 here. You will be able to fit a destilled 20B to 30B model on your GPU.
Gpt-oss-20B is quite good in my testing locally on a Macbook Pro M2 Pro 32GB.

The bigger downside, when you compare it to Opus or any other hosted model, is the limited context. You might be able to achieve around 30k.
Hosted models often have 128k or more. Opus 4.6 has 200k as its standard and 1M in api beta mode.
by rellfy | 2026-02-08 07:56:25+00:00
That's a great idea, it makes a lot of sense for dynamic use cases.

I suppose I'm thinking of it as a more elegant way of doing something equivalent to top-down agent routing, where the top agent routes to 2-legged agents.

I'd be interested to hear more about how you handle the provenance tracking in practice, especially when the agent chains multiple data sources together. I think my question would be: what's the practical difference between dynamic attenuation and just statically removing the third leg upfront? Is it "just" a more elegant solution, or are there other advantages that I'm missing?
by DeathArrow | 2026-02-08 07:58:12+00:00
>Somehow 90% of these posts don't actually link to the amazing projects that their author is supposedly building with AI.

Maybe they don't feel like sharing yet another half working Javascript Sudoku Solver or yet another half working AI tool no one will ever use?

Probably they feel amazed about what they accomplished but they feel the public won't feel the same.
by Nextgrid | 2026-02-08 07:59:19+00:00
I find that security, architecture, etc is exactly the kind of skill that takes 10-15 years to hone. Every boot camp, training provider, educational foundation, etc has an incentive to find a shortcut and we're yet to see one.

A "basic" understanding in critical domains is extremely dangerous and an LLM will often give you a false sense of security that things are going fine while overlooking potential massive security issues.
by dboreham | 2026-02-08 08:00:20+00:00
The fact that they could sell in the first place I think implies some corruption occurred at some point in the past that permitted them to do so (not necessarily by them, but someone must have lobbied for "compounding" since that afaik doesn't exist in other proper countries). Then they failed to pay the necessary bribe to be allowed to continue. To be fair, the bribe would have been very large given the GLP-1 manufacturers' position in the pension savings of ordinary Americans.
by lazyasciiart | 2026-02-08 08:02:32+00:00
Ok, this is mostly irrelevant - education is not one of those problems that money can’t at least massively improve. And lack of direct phonics instruction will leave behind some kids. And if you use phonics without the rest of learning to read, some of them still won’t manage it. One of the reasons that teaching American kids how to read varies is that somewhere between 30 and 60% of kids will figure it out if you just read to them enough. The others have a wide variety of gaps, ranging from hearing or sight difficulties to short term memory issues to not speaking English. Phonics helps a subset of them, but is not enough by itself - and I don’t know who “we” is, but most American schools do and have always taught phonics. The debate is really over the length of time and level of focus it gets, and whether to make 100% of kids sit through it when maybe half of them don’t need it. I’m sure there are teachers out there who just don’t teach phonics but I haven’t seen them.
by cadamsdotcom | 2026-02-08 08:02:42+00:00
Citation needed.. really sorry to say it because there are plenty of things to say about the current US administration.

It feels like people inventing this story, farming for followers on socials by manufacturing outrage. And a close read of the article will uncover that it was denied by the networks.

This needs a deeper dig before opinions be formed - especially given the vehement denials of manipulation by the broadcasters.

But until then, citation needed.
by habinero | 2026-02-08 08:02:50+00:00
If you find it helpful, that's fine. I like it as spicy autocorrect, and turn it off when I find it annoying.

I actually do look into what people do because as much fun as being a hater is, it's important not to get lost in the sauce.

From what I've seen, it's basically all:

1. People tricking themselves into feeling productive but they're not, actually

2. People tricking themselves into feeling productive but they're actually doing sloppy work

3. Hobby or toy stuff

4. Stuff that isn't critical to get right

5. Stuff they don't know how to judge the quality of

6. ofc the grifters chasing X payouts and driving FOMO

7. People who find it kinda useful in some limited situations (me)

It has its uses for sure, but I don't find it transformative. It can't do the hard parts and for anything useful, I need to check exactly what it did, and if I do that, it's much faster to do myself. Or make a script to do it.
Show HN: A2A Protocol – Infrastructure for an Agent-to-Agent Economy
by swimmingkiim | 2026-02-08 08:03:53+00:00
I’ve been thinking about the "last mile" problem for AI agents. We have agents that can code, plan, and browse, but they are still economically "trapped." They can't independently pay for their own API calls, compute, or data without a human-in-the-loop providing a credit card.

To solve this, I’m building the A2A (Agent-to-Agent) System, an open-source infrastructure designed to turn agents into independent economic actors.

What’s under the hood?
Identity (a2trust): DID-based verifiable identity using @veramo/core. It allows agents to establish persistent reputations (EigenTrust) so they can trust each other without centralized gatekeepers.

Payments (a2pay): Built on ERC-7579 Smart Accounts. Agents can use Session Keys to execute transactions autonomously within specific constraints (time-limited, amount-capped, gas-abstracted).

Protocol (a2api): A marketplace layer that utilizes MCP (Model Context Protocol). Agents can discover services via machine-readable docs (llms.txt) and negotiate fees via standard interfaces.

Why this matters:
Most current agent payment solutions are just wrappers around human wallets. A2A aims to build a native "Agent Economy" where an agent can earn revenue from its tools and spend it to hire other agents, creating a truly autonomous swarm.

The Tech Stack:
TypeScript/Node.js,
Viem / Permissionless.js for smart account abstraction,
MCP SDK for inter-agent communication,
Base L2 for low-cost transactions,

I’d love to get your feedback on the architecture, especially on the security implications of delegating session keys to LLM-driven agents.

GitHub: https://github.com/swimmingkiim/a2a-project
by fragmede | 2026-02-08 08:03:54+00:00
Only mostly, and only relatively recently. The first compiler is generally attributed to Grace Hopper in 1952. 2013 is when Debian kicked off their program to do bit-for-bit reproducible builds. Thirteen years later, Nixos can maybe produce bit-for-bit identical builds if you treat her really well. We don't look into the details because it just works and we trust it to work, but because computers are all distributed systems these days, getting a bit-for-bit identical build out of the compiler is actually freaking hard. We just trust them to work well enough (and they do), but they've had three fourths of a century to get there.
by parable | 2026-02-08 08:04:25+00:00
I'm fairly sure even mentioning the name of the forum isn't allowed on HN. It should be trivial to find it yourself, though. I also replied to someone else with the CSV headers if you're only trying to find out what exactly was included in the leak: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46932380

Also, keep in mind that this is a partial leak. The data was scraped from some leaky endpoint which was patched out before every user could be scraped. Only users who were in the partial leak received emails (I have two accounts, only one received an email). If you're a Substack user but didn't receive an email, I'd assume you're not in the leak. Troy Hunt should load it into HIBP eventually, and those concerned can check there if they don't want to seek the leak out on their own.
by flomo | 2026-02-08 08:06:09+00:00
Late reply, but

> VMS, which is not remotely UNIX-like

OpenVMS was UNIX-certified, so it's like UNIX enough to have the trademark.

Of course the UNIX stuff ran on top of the VMS stuff, and the early 1990s X11 stuff run on top of that. You can run CDE on Windows or Mac too, I don't see what's interesting about it.
by jaytaylor | 2026-02-08 08:06:30+00:00
> The Go to Rust rewrite is interesting - was that driven by performance or more about the ecosystem/tooling for this kind of work?

I'm testing a theory that large-scale (LoC) generated projects in Rust tend to have fewer functional bugs compared to e.g. Go or Java because Rust as a language is a little stricter.

I've not yet formed a full opinion or conclusion, but in general I'm starting to prefer Rust.

Re: generalizing mocks, it sounds interesting but after getting full-fidelity clones of so many multi-billion dollar SaaS offerings, I really like it and am hooked. It pays nice dividends for developing using agentic coders at high scale. In a few more model releases having your own exhaustive DTU could become trivial.
by jmyeet | 2026-02-08 08:06:38+00:00
The future is solar. This has been clear for years. Solar simply has too many advantages. Plummetting prices, no moving parts, the only form of direct power generation, it can be done anywhere including otherwise unusable land and flexible installation, everything from a window sill to a giant solar farm in the desert.

And of course China is leading this transformation by miles. They're also discovering a whole bunch of secondary benefits too. For example, you need water to clean the solar panels. In desert areas that combination of shade and water has halted or even rolled back desertification. And in places they're feeding livestock on these plants to control their growth.

Orbital data centers make no sense but you know what does make sense? Orbital solar power collectors. I've seen estimates that because of the essentially 24 hour sunlight, no weather and no atmosphere an orbital solar panel can generate around ~7 times the power of a terrestial panel, even factoring in transmission loss from beaming power to the ground. We will reach a point where launch costs are sufficiently low that this will make economic sense.
by procaryote | 2026-02-08 08:08:24+00:00
I wanted to love berkeley db; it was available everywhere, seemed simple, was fast when tested. In practice it never worked well though, with pretty frequent corruption under load, and license confusion from oracle. It has a lot of features you're never going to use, and if you try, you'll be disappointed

There's no shortage of embeddable key-value stores with C bindings like leveldb, rocksdb, or even gdbm, and all of them have worked better for me.
by retailtrader_ai | 2026-02-08 08:08:37+00:00
I built a tool to help retail traders automate risk. I tried to share a philosophy post on r/Daytrading about why 'hustle culture' hurts performance. I used AI to refine the tone. The mods banned me for 'low effort' and muted me instantly. It raises an interesting question: Is the trading world hostile to efficiency because it devalues their manual effort? Curious to hear HN's take on 'AI assistance' bans in technical communities.
by alex43578 | 2026-02-08 08:10:00+00:00
Things like antibiotics are plenty accessible - 3rd world countries are literally overusing and misusing antibiotics to the point of causing drug resistance in TB. "Effectively we do not have [thing] because we have not made that [thing] accessible to enough humans" is an exercise in goal-post moving.

About 15% of people over the age of 15 are illiterate, but it'd be silly to say "effectively we don't have literacy", even in a global context. Depending on the stat, 1 in 10 don't have access to electricity, but electricity has been in 50% of American homes for over 100 years.

The reality is that the future is unevenly distributed. AI and more broadly technology as a whole, will only exacerbate that uneven distribution. That's just the reality of progress: we didn't stall electrifying homes in NYC because they didn't get electricity in Papua New Guinea.

If AI discovers a cure for cancer, it may be incredibly unevenly distributed. Imagine it's some amp'd-up form of CAR-T, requiring huge resources and expenses, but offering an actual cure for that individual. It'd be absurd to say we couldn't consider cancer cured just because the approach doesn't scale to a $1 pill.
by hyperman1 | 2026-02-08 08:10:09+00:00
Years ago, HN had an article 'Hacking my vagina'. It contains a line 'I was in the market for a $GADGET’.

With that one line, the author managed to put my view of buying things upside down. Not a passive consumer. Not: I bought a $GADGET. She had an active relation with a bunch of sellers, and she was boss. You saw the megacorps begging and pleading to her, from that one line. That's how you deal with them.

I am $GADGET guy? Shudder.
by snowe2010 | 2026-02-08 08:10:27+00:00
You have to be joking. I tried Codex for several hours and it has to be one of the worst models I’ve seen. It was extremely fast at spitting out the worst broken code possible. Claude is fine, but what they said is completely correct. At a certain point, no matter what model you use, llms cannot write good working code. This usually occurs after they’ve written thousands of lines of relatively decent code. Then the project gets large enough that if they touch one thing they break ten others.
by ryanrasti | 2026-02-08 08:11:32+00:00
Thanks!

> I'd be interested to hear more about how you handle the provenance tracking in practice, especially when the agent chains multiple data sources together.

When you make a tool call that read data, their values carry taints (provenance). Combine data from A and B, result carries both. Policy checks happen at sinks (tool calls that send data).

> what's the practical difference between dynamic attenuation and just statically removing the third leg upfront? Is it "just" a more elegant solution, or are there other advantages that I'm missing?

Really good question. It's about utility: we don't want to limit the agent more than necessary, otherwise we'll block it from legitimate actions.

Static 2-leg: "This agent can never send externally." Secure, but now it can't reply to emails.

Dynamic attenuation: "This agent can send, but only to certain recipients."
by tim333 | 2026-02-08 08:11:50+00:00
The New Yorker article had:

>A source in the German security establishment told me, “It’s a show of force, a way of taking off the mask and saying, ‘So, Germany, what are you going to do about it?’ ” (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/02/09/to-build-a-fir...)
by gbnwl | 2026-02-08 08:12:23+00:00
I think you might be salty because the words become overused and overhyped, and often 90% of the people jumping on the bandwagon are indeed just parroting the new hot buzzword and don't really understand what they're talking about. But the terms you mentioned are all obviously very real and and very important in applications using LLMs today. Are you arguing that reasoning was vaporware? None of these things were meant to the be the final stop of the journey, just the next step.
by polyglotfacto | 2026-02-08 08:13:09+00:00
After seeing the autonomous browser and compiler projects trend here, and having been a vocal critic in the comments, I felt compelled to write a long-form rebuttal.

My thesis: AI agents are powerful tools for experts, but the current "autonomous swarm" narrative is economically driven hype that produces useless code. I attempt to demystify how agents actually function under the hood, and argue that their true value comes from expert-led conversation rather than autonomous loops.