MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by instalabsai | 2026-02-09 11:57:06+00:00
https://instagit.com

I’ve been shipping 90+% AI-written code for 2 years now. I can build something amazing in 40 mins but then spend 4+ hours debugging because the agent has no idea how the libraries it’s calling actually work. Docs are stale, StackOverflow is dead, training data is outdated. Every engineer I talk to has the same problem.

So I built Instagit, an MCP server that lets your coding agent understand any GitHub repo in depth, directly answers from the source code. No hallucinations, always up to date. Works with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw, etc.

No API key or account needed to try it out. Just need to share these instructions with your coding agent to get started:

curl -s https://instagit.com/install.md
by n4r9 | 2026-02-09 11:57:50+00:00
Banks' Culture series is certainly in this vein. In a post-scarcity society not only is there no limits on energy, but there is very little additional benefit to gain from violence to others.

A potential counter to your post would be LeGuin's "The Dispossessed", where a resource-strapped planet-mining society maintains an anarcho-syndicalist society without private ownership, centralised government, or military forces. The likelihood of defection is minimised by firstly the values passed onto younger generations in their education system, and secondly the lack of actual benefit (since few people would follow you and there's not much material wealth or power to gain). Perhaps this is the "other extreme" in which anarchist principles can be explored.
by mrkeen | 2026-02-09 11:57:50+00:00
I can't make a Mappable interface, and have my classes implement map(f). Because map(f) will necessarily return Mappable, not my class itself. So no method chaining for me.

Also null. Yeah I know it's contentious. People don't want to let go of it. Since learning to hate null, I've also lost any nuance in my ability to explain why it's bad. Because I know longer see it as 'subtly-bad' or 'might lead to bugs'. It's just plain, on-the-surface-wrong. One might as well have named it 'wrong' rather than 'null'.

'Null' is the thing which it isn't. I can write business logic that says every Person has a Name. Once you admit null into the mix, I can no longer make that simplest of statements. My autocomplete now lies to me, because person may or may not implement the method .name().

"But how will I half-arse instantiate a Person? I don't have a Name, yet I want to tell the computer I have a Person?" It makes me happy that you can't.

"I wrote a function that promises to return a Person. I was unable to return a Person. How can I tell the computer I'm returning a Person even though I'm not?" Glad that you can't.
by teekert | 2026-02-09 11:58:09+00:00
Hmm, never been there, but it never feels good to be lumped in with some group (especially when they have lunatics in the name) instead of receiving feedback that may point at errors in judgement. I'm generally considered knowledgeable and I'm just thinking from the perspective of owning a company and employees taking these actions instead of coming to talk to me, showing evidence of my poor management decisions.

I'm off now to find what PMC is, thank you.

Edit: Looked around for sometime, no idea still what PMC is.
by ekrapivin | 2026-02-09 11:58:22+00:00
https://inSolitaire.com

I'm enjoying building a website with solitaire and puzzle games.

I am currently rewriting the engine for the Nth time and plan to add 400 games to the platform in the coming months, as well as social features such as daily challenges, awards and leaderboards.

My ambition is to make this project the largest collection of free modern solitaire games available for all kinds of devices.
by onel | 2026-02-09 11:58:42+00:00
https://github.com/askmanu/acorn

A straightforward and simple AI agent framework.
It puts a lot of emphasis on the loop and the steps in that loop. You can change in real time the model, the temperature, the tools, the history.
You're also able to spin-off work on a branch and then add the result of that work on the main branch.
Still early but developing very fast.
by Hendrikto | 2026-02-09 11:59:33+00:00
You don’t need a third party, or anybodies permission, nobody can censor you or block your transactions, you don’t need a bank account with everything that entails. The barrier of entry is the same as creating an SSH keypair. It works globally, fast, cheap. You do not need to trust anybody, all the code is open and the ledger is cryptographically verifiable by anyone. There are lots of advantages.
by gjulianm | 2026-02-09 12:00:26+00:00
> This was the equivalent of a "weekend project", and it's amazing

> Building a C compiler which can correctly compile (maybe not link) the modern linux kernel is damn hard.

Is it correctly compiling it? Several people have pointed out that the compiler will not emit errors for clearly invalid code. What code is it actually generating?

> Building a C compiler which can correctly compile sqlite and pass the test suite at any speed is damn hard.

It's even harder to have a C compiler that can correctly compile SQLite and pass the test suite but then the SQLite binary itself fails to execute certain queries (see https://github.com/anthropics/claudes-c-compiler/issues/74).

> which, in comparison with a correct modern C compiler, is far less performance critical, complex, broad, etc.

That code might be less complex for us, but more complex for an LLM if it has to deal with lots of domain-specific context and without a test suite that has been developed for 40 years.

Also, if the end result of the LLM has the same problem that Anthropic concedes here, which is that the project is so fragile that bug fixes or improvements are really hard/almost impossible, that still matters.

> it really seems that the complaints here aren't about the LLMs themselves, or the agents, but about what people/organizations do with them, which is then a complaint about people, but not the technology

It's a discussion about what the LLMs can actually do and how people represent those achievements. We're point out that LLMs, without human supervision, generate bad code, code that's hard to change, with modifications specifically made to address failing tests without challenging the underlying assumptions, code that's inconsistent and hard to understand even for the LLMs.

But some people are taking whatever the LLM outputs at face value, and then claiming some capabilities of the models that are not really there. They're still not viable for using without human supervision, and because the AI labs are focusing on synthetic benchmarks, they're creating models that are better at pushing through crappy code to achieve a goal.
Show HN: FederalGifts – What foreign governments give American officials
by schwad | 2026-02-09 12:00:30+00:00
Every year, foreign governments give gifts to US government officials — everything from jeweled swords to luxury watches to ornate rugs. Federal law requires these to be disclosed (and most go to the National Archives, since officials can't keep gifts worth over ~$480).

I built FederalGifts to make this data browsable and searchable. You can explore by:

- Individual gifts (with descriptions and estimated values)

- Recipients (which officials received the most?)

- Donor countries (which nations give the most lavishly?)

- Agencies

Some interesting finds:
- Saudi Arabia and UAE consistently give the most expensive gifts
- The most common gifts are jewelry, decorative items, and books
- The State Department receives the lion's share

The data comes from the Federal Register and State Department disclosures — public information that's technically available but practically impossible
to browse.

Built with Rails and open data. No login required, no tracking.
Show HN: Open-source zero-trust framework for AI agents- 12 services, all tested
by yamigopal | 2026-02-09 12:01:08+00:00
Author here. We've been building agent trust infrastructure for ~1 year (12 microservices for identity, behavior monitoring, data governance, etc).
When the CSA published their Agentic Trust Framework spec, we realized our stack maps to all 5 elements — but the spec has no reference implementation. So we built one.
What we added that the spec leaves open:
- Maturity model runtime (agents earn autonomy through 5 promotion gates)
- Policy-as-code segmentation engine (real-time access decisions)
- Circuit breaker for incident response (auto-containment)
Everything is MIT. You can clone the repo and run `npm test` — 25 contract validation tests.
Repo: https://github.com/yogami/atf-reference-implementation
Interactive demo: https://berlinailabs.de/atf-demo.html
Happy to answer architecture questions.
by troupo | 2026-02-09 12:01:45+00:00
> Modern society has an insane demand for transportation. Roads – the medium on which we transport things – are the fabric on which cities are built. Not just inside the cities, but the vast network of roads outside the city, that feed it.

This is a very American point of view IMO.

Cities are built on streets first and foremost. Otherwise you end up with strip malls separated by endless swaths of car parks.

As for transportation, we have to separate cargo from people, and inner city from inter-city.

For people inside the city you have multi-modal transport options. Walking, biking, busses, trams, subways, commuter trains, taxis, individual cars, ferries.

For intercity people you have trains, planes, boats, busses, individual cars.

Most inner city cargo can be handled by smaller trucks going from warehouses to specific places in the city. And for smaller cargo like mail I've even seen small scooters and cargo bikes.

For inter-city you once again have multi-modal transport (depending on the city). Trucks, rail, cargo planes, boats.

Even the US was built on railways, not on roads. Roads are the "backbone of cities" only if you make them one, as the US has done
Show HN: Susscore – Open-source link scanner to check if a URL is sketchy
by rebelchrisycom | 2026-02-09 12:02:56+00:00
Hey HN! I built susscore because I got tired of hovering over links wondering "is this a phish?"

It's fully open source and runs 11 checks in real-time:

• Domain age & reputation
• SSL certificate validation
• Known phishing database lookup
• Brand impersonation detection (40+ brands)
• URL pattern analysis (typosquatting, suspicious paths)
• Redirect chain inspection
• And more...
No signup, no tracking, just paste and go.

GitHub: https://github.com/rebelchris/susscore

Built with Next.js. PRs welcome, especially for adding more brand patterns or regional phishing detection.

What checks would you want to see added?
by jama211 | 2026-02-09 12:03:18+00:00
I dunno I get it to do stuff every day that’s never been done before, if you prompt really well, give loads of context, and take it slowly it’s amazing at it and still saves me a ton of time.

I always suspect the devil is in the details with these posts. The difference between smart prompting strategies and the way I see most people prompt ai is vast.
by vipdestiny | 2026-02-09 12:04:08+00:00
MCP solves the wiring problem nicely, but once you have more than one coding agent running, coordination becomes the real bottleneck.

I ran into repeated issues with agents editing the same files, losing decisions, and drifting away from the spec. I ended up building a small Rust MCP server that adds task claiming, file-level locking, and drift checks against SPEC.md.

It’s intentionally boring infrastructure… single binary, file-based state, deterministic orchestration. The AI tools stay interchangeable.

Repo if anyone’s curious: https://github.com/nxtg-ai/forge-orchestrator
by rob74 | 2026-02-09 12:04:36+00:00
Wow, that's an impressive amount of dedication, but I guess you need that if you want to set a world record:

> He monitored weather conditions closely to find the right window and right location. After a lot of travelling he arrived at Aksu village. The village wasn't accessible by car due to snow and ice so he hiked to the summit. After 10 hours of climbing, he stood on the summit with moonlight providing enough light to set up his equipment. At midnight, he recalls that the temperature was around -12°C with winds around 8 m/s. He remained there all night capturing panoramic photos. Before sunrise, the wind picked up to roughly 20-25 m/s and the battle of capturing his world record image began. He planned to capture the image at sunrise to improve contrast and whilst he is pleased with the final result, he is already making plans for his next record-breaking image.

But still, that kinda confirms my observation about the pesky atmosphere: even with optimal weather conditions, he still needed the sun lighting up the sky behind the mountains just before sunrise, otherwise they would have blended in with the sky at the horizon...

This also applies for much shorter distances: despite what the publicity photos suggest, you can't see the Alps from Munich most of the time (or only as slightly darker shapes on the horizon), although they're "only" ~ 75 km away. You need really good weather to see them clearly...
by radius89 | 2026-02-09 12:05:00+00:00
Hey! Wow, I knew about OpenTechCalendar but somehow hadn't realised (or likely forgot) how close to home it was! I'll definitely reach out for a chat at some point.

And thanks for the tips - I completely agree on the point about data being held hostage, and on the openness of data - it's one of the more frequent complaints about Meetup. I've recently added an API for event creation, so it won't be hard to add another endpoint for listings (at the moment, we just have an embeddable widget [1] showing your next 3 events).

ICAL is a brilliant suggestion - I've had a few requests for that already, and it's especially interesting in the context of opentechcalendar. I'm very interested in ActivityPub and all things fediverse as well - figuring out how to integrate these ideas into the platform is one of the next items on my TODO list.

[1] https://radius.to/blog/embed-events-widget-website
by igravious | 2026-02-09 12:05:48+00:00
> A one is always a one; you don’t measure it and find it off by some error; you can’t measure it a second time and get a different value.

Linus Torvalds famously only uses ECC memory in his dev machines. Why? Because every now and again either a cosmic ray or some electronic glitch will flip a bit from a zero to a one or from a one to a zero in his RAM. So no, a one is not always a one. A zero is not always a zero. In fact, you can measure it and find it off by some error. You can measure it a second time and get a different value. And because of this ever-so-slight glitchiness we invented ECC memory. Error correction codes are a thing because of this fundamental glitchiness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory

We understand when and how things can go wrong and we correct for that. Same goes for LLMs. In fact I would go so far as to say that someone doesn't even really think like how a software/hardware engineer ought to think if this is not nearly immediately obvious.

Besides the but-they're-not-deterministic crowd there's also the oh-you-find-coding-painful-do-you crowd. Both are engaging in this sort of real men write code with their bare hands nonsense -- if that were the case then why aren't we still flipping bits using toggle switches? We automate stuff, do we not? How is this not a step-change in automation? For the first time in my life my ideas aren't constrained by how much code I can manually crank out and it's liberating. It's not like when I ask my coding agent to provide me with a factorial function in Haskell it draws a tomato. It will, statistically speaking, give me a factorial function in Haskell. Even if I have never written a line of Haskell in my life. That's astounding. I can now write in Haskell if I want. Or Rust. Or you-name-it.

Aren't there projects you wanted to embark on but the sheer amount of time you'd need just to crank out the code prevented you from even taking the first step? Now you can! Do you ever go back to a project and spend hours re-familiarising yourself with your own code. Now it's a two minute "what was I doing here?" away from you.

> The non-determinism has nothing to do with temperature; it has everything to do with that fact that even at temp equal to zero, a single meaningless change can produce a different result. It has to do with there being no way to predict what will happen when you run the model on your prompt.

I never meant to imply that the only factor involved was temperature. For our purposes this is a pedantic correction.

> Coding with LLMs is not the same job. How could it be the same to write a mathematical proof compared to asking an LLM to generate that proof for you?

Correct, it's not the same. Nobody is arguing that it's the same. And it's wrong that it's different, it's just different that it's different.

> These are different tasks that use different parts of the brain.

Yes. And so what's your point?
by alexjreid | 2026-02-09 12:06:25+00:00
Delving deep into novel ways to extend Excel and make it more accessible. Perhaps different approach to copilot in that AI is only used during authoring, the yielded output being a standalone artifact.

The result is https://xllify.com

It embeds Luau which tames the very old school C SDK. This means that the same code can run as native add-ins on Windows (XLL) and the more modern-but-far-slower web engine, thanks to WASM. Luau is safe and fast.

The exact same bytecode runs in both styles of add-in. You get the performance of native with no extra work. Many approaches for writing custom functions are unacceptably slow, particularly when their inputs come from fast moving realtime data feeds.

I know Luau is perhaps a left-field choice. However, coupled with a coding assistant and bringing that lightweight conversational dev experience right into Excel (xllify Assistant is an add-in itself) this is perhaps less of a barrier.
by mrkeen | 2026-02-09 12:06:33+00:00
I was recently switched from Java to C# at work.

Initially I was impressed by the null detection. Then I found out about defaults. Way worse than null.

C and Go can demand a bit of ceremony with manual error checks. Things get bad if you forget to do the checks.

Java and Checked exceptions forced error-checking, which is a little verbose, and most of the time you can't 'handle' (for any meaning other than log) them, so you just rethrow.

C# went with unchecked exceptions. But with default values, there's no need to throw! Avoid Java's messy NPE encounters by just writing the wrong value to the database.
by xigoi | 2026-02-09 12:06:39+00:00
In 2030, an AI model that I can run on my computer, without having to trust an evil megacorporation, will not be able to write a compiler for my markup language [0] based on a corpus of examples, without seeing the original implementation, using no more than 1.5× as much code as I did.

https://git.sr.ht/~xigoi/hilda
by ifyoubuildit | 2026-02-09 12:07:55+00:00
I didn't take being barely able to afford ramen as someone who is going to starve to death. Their health is probably pretty poor, but I was assuming like in real life there would be other options.

Like I said before, if the alternative is death, then obviously stealing is justified. But if the alternative is the soup kitchen or something, then I can't justify stealing the steak. Otherwise you're on a slippery slope.
by theorchid | 2026-02-09 12:08:21+00:00
In my opinion, Opus 4.6 handles instructions (especially negative rules) better than Opus 4.5 and Sonnet 4.5. It also applies skills better than other models.

But I think this is individual.

Another example. I asked gpt-5.2-codex to add an array of 5 values to the script and write a small piece of code. Then I manually deleted one of the values in the array and asked the agent to commit.
But the model edited the file again and added the value I deleted to the array.
I deleted that value again and asked the agent to “just commit.” But the agent edited the file again before committing.
This happened many times, and I used different commands, such as “never edit the file, just commit.” The model responded that it understood the command and began editing the file. I switched to gpt-5.2, but that didn't help.

I switched to sonnet-4.5, and it immediately committed on the first try without editing the file.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-09 12:08:55+00:00
Yes, this is exactly the problem.

Programming productivity has been crippled for decades by the inability to reuse code due to copyright restrictions.

Because of this, the same problems have been solved again and again for countless times, because the companies employing the programmers wanted to have their own "IP" covering the solution. As a programmer, you cannot reuse your own past programs, if they have been written when employed elsewhere, so that the past employer owns them now.

Now using AI one can circumvent all copyright laws, gaining in productivity about as much as what you could have done in the past, had you been permitted to copy and paste anything into your programs.

This would be perfectly fine if the programmers who do not use an AI agent were allowed to do the same thing, i.e. to search the training programs used by the AI and just copy and paste anything from there.
Show HN: Printable Classics – Free printable classic books for hobby bookbinders
by bookman10 | 2026-02-09 12:09:04+00:00
I created a site (https://printableclassics.com) that allows you to download classic books and customize things like the font size, page size, and the cover.

As part of this, I wrote a software pipeline that takes epubs, html files, or pdfs and converts them into formatted books with custom covers, page numbers, chapter formatting, etc.

I used an LLM for categorizing the books. There's a nice way to filter such that you could easily find "Young Adult, Ancient, Fantasy" for example.

When downloading from the site, the PDFS are rendered in a work queue. Hopefully the server I'm using won't get overwhelmed. It takes around 10-15 seconds to generate for most books.

Most of the books currently on the site are from Standard Ebooks. I plan to add more books from Archive.org and Project Gutenberg over time.

I also created a little guide on how you can print and bind books at home with around $200 in equipment. (https://printableclassics.com/print-guide)

Printable versions of the Harvard Classics are available here: https://printableclassics.com/harvard_classics This is an example of direct PDF conversion.

Hopefully this is useful to some people. I plan to use the books here for home education myself so it will at least be useful to me. I'd like to add a guide with top suggestions by age level and some educational theory on how I made the selections. I'm happy to take any feedback on the site or answer any questions.

There is also the option to have the books professionally printed through a print on demand provider. I'm hoping that could be a way to pay for the site hosting.

Thanks for checking it out!
by drbt | 2026-02-09 12:09:11+00:00
I developed a design called GCRI (Generalized Cognitive Refinement Iteration) to see if LLMs can reach 'System 2' reasoning without external tools or self-correction loops. By forcing agents into a structured debate, I achieved 95% on HumanEval using GPT-OSS-120B. Thought I'd share the methodology and results.
by latexr | 2026-02-09 12:09:29+00:00
> where is the UBI?

I have a bridge to sell¹ to everyone who ever believed Sam Altman was serious about and ever cared about UBI. All his “career” was about himself, he couldn’t give a rat’s ass about anyone else. Only way he’d care about UBI is if that somehow would benefit him even more than the alternatives.

¹ Not really. Unlike Sam, I’d feel bad about scamming anyone.