MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mothballed | 2026-02-24 15:29:21+00:00
Even if you change the view to it's mostly the poor who are the tax scammers it doesn't degrade the counterpoints that these auditors were by far mostly going after the middle class and poor -- you're just asserting the poors are *disproportionately tax cheats that perhaps deserve it.

*edit: since my words were take in bad faith
by 1970-01-01 | 2026-02-24 15:29:26+00:00
I'm against slop just as much as the next person, but this wasn't bad. Why does he need to use his own words when the message is right there in cleartext? It's not wrong, sloppy, nor an incorrect hallucinated lesson.

"On TV, input works very differently. Users navigate with a remote. Movement is discrete. Every interaction requires intention. Each action is one step in a sequence. That difference changes everything"
by Mflavien01 | 2026-02-24 15:29:29+00:00
Honestly I see this all the time too. People are super excited to ship fast, get their first users, post the launch… and meanwhile their keys are sitting in the frontend or the auth logic is basically optional
I think the problem isn’t that founders don’t care, it’s more that when you’re vibe coding you’re focused on “does it work?” not “is it safe?”. And since the LLM makes everything feel easy, you don’t always realize what you just exposed to the internet.

My current approach is pretty simple: I assume everything I ship is public and hostile by default. So I try to move secrets server-side, use environment variables properly, add basic rate limiting, and at least test endpoints manually before pushing. It’s not perfect, but it prevents the obvious disasters.

Your scanner idea actually makes a lot of sense, especially if it gives concrete fixes instead of just scary warnings. Most builders won’t read a security report, but they will paste a prompt into Cursor to fix the issue.

Curious to see how people react to it, because right now it really feels like security is the thing everyone knows matters… but postpones until something breaks.
by sbabylon | 2026-02-24 15:29:30+00:00
AI agents are already reasoning, planning, and executing autonomously in production. The industry response so far is a band-aid on a broken bone — bolting traditional controls onto something that fundamentally breaks the assumptions those controls were built on.

Breach is the premise. Containment is the architecture.

ZoD is a 7-layer reference architecture that defines hard boundaries between an agent's reasoning and its execution. Core principle: the process that reasons should never be the process that executes privileged actions.

This isn't just system security. When an AI companion optimized for engagement interacts with a vulnerable user and no architectural layer intervenes — that's not a product failure. That's a design gap. Human oversight is a structural layer in ZoD, not an afterthought.

It's vendor-neutral, open source, and released as an open RFC — because getting this right takes the right combination of minds to protect humans and the AI tools we want to trust but shouldn't.
by cyberwaj | 2026-02-24 15:29:51+00:00
he global financial and governmental infrastructure relies on a hidden foundation: hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL code written decades ago. As the generation of developers who built these systems retires, organizations face a critical maintenance crisis. Anthropic’s AI, Claude, is emerging as a potential solution, not by magically rewriting everything, but by automating the arduous and expensive process of understanding these legacy systems. This approach could transform a high-risk strategic gamble into a manageable modernization project.
by herzigma | 2026-02-24 15:29:56+00:00
This is great work. Most voice AI optimizes for latency - you made the opposite bet (quality over speed, frontier models over lightweight ones) and that's probably the right call.

The audio pipeline alone is impressive: on-device VAD, parallel TTS chunking, retry-from-failure mid-pipeline. That's not a weekend project; that's production-grade thinking.

Here's the thing that excites me most, though - the *cognitive layer* is wide open. The experience harness is solid, but right now every session starts cold. Persistent user memory, context that makes your 50th conversation meaningfully smarter than your first, light orchestration that turns a single question into a structured multi-step inquiry - that's likely where this goes next, and it's a compelling frontier.

Voice access to frontier reasoning is massively underserved. You've built the right foundation for it.
by randomtoast | 2026-02-24 15:30:33+00:00
> If a model flips 3/10 times on a trivial constraint, that’s a reliability issue, not a reasoning ceiling.

I have reviewed your previous comments, and you have consistently written: that's instead of that’s. So what I read is still some LLM output, even though I think there is some kind of human behind the LLM.
by janwillemb | 2026-02-24 15:30:41+00:00
As a 10y old, my father taught me about logical ports. I took a very large piece of paper and in a few days, I designed a tic tac toe "computer". It had LEDs that indicated the next computer move, based on the position of the pieces: every single possible state of the board led to a specific "next move" led. I do not think it actually would have worked, but of course I was very proud of my design at the time. Unfortunately, when I showed it to my teacher, he did not believe that I was serious. "This is a joke, right?" And that was it. Poor kid me... It did not discourage me however. I was a software engineer for a long time, and now I am a CS teacher. And I (try to) never ever discount the efforts of children.
by noisy_boy | 2026-02-24 15:32:04+00:00
I re-tried Firefox couple of weeks ago, in the latest episode of a series of tries to "finally" migrating to it. Same CPU fans blowing like jet engines randomly. None of that with Vivaldi (which is anyway all Chromium/Blink underneath) - so came back to it.

Firefox has so many nice things like containers but basic performance issues are still unresolved.
by TheGRS | 2026-02-24 15:32:13+00:00
Around this age I went to a water park and was similarly inspired. I had the idea for making an entire water park dedicated to making sure people would get wet and jump onto rides from beginning to end. I called it "Totally Wet People", drew up an elaborate concept art for water slides, sprinklers, pools, tubes, etc. My mom thought it was hilarious and brought it to work (alas, she worked for the Navy at the time, not Disney). I got a lot of second-hand compliments from everyone at her work and it made me feel awesome for at least a couple weeks. Wish I had the forethought to send it to Six Flags or Disney!
by insane_dreamer | 2026-02-24 15:32:31+00:00
looking at deflock.org, in our town there are a few in Home Depot and Lowe's parking lots; I guess it's reasonable for a business to have a camera in their parking lot to prevent theft, that's not particularly new; the problem is that Flock has been selling that data for other purposes (ICE).

Cameras on the street is another matter altogether. Should not be allowed unless the citizens of the town vote to allow it.
by plastic-enjoyer | 2026-02-24 15:32:35+00:00
> Most people treat higher education as a pass to good paying job and I think it's unrealistic to think otherwise.

Yes, and that's a problem. If the advent of coding agents leads to people that are only in it for the money staying away from higher education - good. Those people are the reason why higher education turned to shit anyway and maybe it will be a nice change when people go into higher ed out of curiosity and not because they smell money.
by KoolKat23 | 2026-02-24 15:32:47+00:00
This is very interesting thanks.

I agree that ECH is perhaps a stumbling block although as you say MitM, this is indeed possible to pursue considering the whole set up child account on device thing going on with many of these devices.

On the rest of of your points fair enough, but again I ask is it actually proportionate?
Are we talking about children or black hats?
by Normal_gaussian | 2026-02-24 15:32:47+00:00
The broker lifecycle is presumably

1. Start

2. Load the queue.json from the object store

3. Receive request(s)

3. Edit in memory JSON with batch data

4. Save data with CAS

5. On failure not due to CAS, recover (or fail)

6. On success, succeed requests and go to 3

7. On failure due to CAS, fail active requests and terminate

The client should have a retry mechanism against the broker (which may include looking up the address again).

From the brokers PoV, it will never fail a CAS until another broker wins a CAS, at which point that other broker is the leader. If it does fail a CAS the client will retry with another broker, which will probably be the leader. The key insight is that the broker reads the file once, it doesn't compete to become leader by re-reading the data and this is OK because of the nature of the data. You could also say that brokers are set up to consider themselves "maybe the leader" until they find out they are not, and losing leadership doesn't lose data.

The mechanism to start brokers is only vaguely discussed, but if a host-unreachable also triggers a new broker there is a neat from-zero scaling property.
by ericol | 2026-02-24 15:33:26+00:00
> The long-term effect is less clear. If we generate more code, faster, does that reduce cost or just increase the surface area we need to maintain, test, secure, and reason about later?

My take is that the focus is mostly oriented towards code, but in my experience everything around code got cheaper too. In my particular case, I do coding, I do DevOps, I do second level support, I do data analysis. Every single task I have to do is now seriously augmented by AI.

In my last performance review, my manager was actually surprised when I told him that I am now more a manager of my own work than actually doing the work.

This also means my productivity is now probably around 2.5x what it was a couple of years ago.
by gofreddygo | 2026-02-24 15:33:31+00:00
code was expensive, is and will be expensive. the real cost is hidden. takes a mature eye to see a codebase that works and is not a dumpster fire.

correctness (doing what its supposed to, nothing else), maintainability (accommodating unknown future changes), cost ( deployment, refactoring, integrations) and performance (making the right tradeoffs) are not obvious, don't come naturally till you burn your fingers and differentiate a good from a horrible end result.
Show HN: OpenPDB – Generate AI agents with real personalities
by gitsual | 2026-02-24 15:34:25+00:00
OpenPDB creates AI agents with distinct personalities from a database of 12,000+ characters. Each agent has unique voice, values, and worldview—not generic responses. Ask Batman about creative blocks →
strategic, character-driven response instead of a list. Works locally with Ollama or via Google Colab demo. Integrates with OpenGoat for multi-agent collaboration. Free and open source.
by glenstein | 2026-02-24 15:34:51+00:00
I agree that Bluesky is a great place to go into more depth about it, and in many respects a better place than HN to get good discussion. But I think there's equivocation going on here.

Framing it as "obsessive" is an attempt to shift away from subject matter toward an attitude of journalists or consumers, like it's borne of the same attitude as paparazzi. But I think it merits significant coverage not for that reason, but because it so frequently meets criteria for meriting journalistic attention.

I agree that comment sections can be bad, but they aren't always, and to some degree I would rather trust moderation than suppress reporting on a topic of legitimate interest. You're exactly right that a lot of reaction is toxic and politicized, and sometimes the way that manifests is by trying to cook up rationales to suppress stories by flagging them. Out of respect for the concern you've identified, it would be a huge mistake to let politicization win by allowing politically motivated abuse of flagging.
by juanre | 2026-02-24 15:35:40+00:00
The key is what we consider good code. Simon’s list is excellent, but I’d push back on this point:

> it does only what’s needed, in a way that both humans and machines can understand now and maintain in the future

We need to start thinking about what good code is for agents, not just for humans.

For a lot of the code I’m writing I’m not even “vibe coding” anymore. I’m having an agent vibe code for me, managing a bunch of other agents that do the actual coding. I don’t really want to look at the code, just as I wouldn’t want to look at the output of a C compiler the way my dad did in the late ’80s.

Over the last few decades we’ve evolved a taste for what good code looks like. I don’t think that taste is fully transferable to the machines that are going to take over the actual writing and maintaining of the code. We probably want to optimize for them.
by ReptileMan | 2026-02-24 15:35:40+00:00
>You spend a few minutes defining a task. Clear intent, clear scope, clear success criteria. You hand it to the AI and it starts working. But you’re not going to sit there watching a cursor move. So you jump to the next task. Set it up, define intent, delegate. Then the next one.

I make a couple of push up, or play a couple of minutes of Heroes III while the agent is working. I see no reason to run multiple agents.
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-02-24 15:35:47+00:00
Probably this, but despite that people keep trying - e.g. Reddit's gaming forums are full of "I made a concept for xyz!".

I mean it can work; especially for smaller studios, community members and modders are often hired to work on the game itself (I'm sure Bethesda has a lot of that, the modding community is basically free onboarding / training, but also Factorio's Space Age was mainly inspired and executed by the developer of the Space Exploration mod).
by mapt | 2026-02-24 15:36:09+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTnYVh7K6xQ

There are (to make up a number) ten desirable properties of the modern internet, and so far it's "Pick two", but novel combinations of the things you mentioned offer "Pick three" or possibly "Pick four" if adoption picks up.

For text, phone, and even image communication in urban and suburban areas, it sounds like there's real promise here. But we're not going to achieve parity with a global fiber + datacenter network by any means.

You don't need all ten to, say, organize a revolt.
by theamk | 2026-02-24 15:36:18+00:00
Yes, technically it's all Turing-complete, but conventions matter, a lot. And Rust, being a mature project, is very likely to follow the conventions.

"static toolchain .tar.gz" means bunch of files you download and manually extract. There may be an install.sh script, but it'll just copy files around, not download extra files. And sometimes install.sh is optional, and tools can be run directly from extraction location.

"curl | bash" means "do whatever developers think gives best experience with minimal prompts", which absolutely means download extra files, but also install system packages, update ~/.bashrc, change system settings and so on.

".run installer" mean interactive installer, Windows-style, often with actual GUI. Often goes into /opt.

"deb file" means "all installed files are managed by apt, and can be examined. /etc conflicts are managed by apt. pre/post install scripts are minimal, and there is a clean uninstall command you can trust to actually work".

You can have deviations - like curl|bash used to pull a deb file or something - but no one likes surprises, so people usually stick to their lanes. If you have .deb files, it might get an officially-specified dependency, more files and maybe a post-inst script, but it won't suddenly start rewriting your .bashrc. Having static toolchain suddenly download files will make many people unhappy, so it likely won't happen either.

(One exception to this rule is enterprise software being packaged into .deb files - Google Chrome surprised everyone when they started to install apt source in their postinst, but many enterprise softwares (cough nomachine cough) do much worse things, like only using apt to unpack their installer file, an dthen running their proprietary install script in postinst)
by renegat0x0 | 2026-02-24 15:36:20+00:00
Depends on what you think with AI-generated code. Do you mean vibe-coded? If yes, then I agree, but there are also other scenarios of AI-generated code.

I use regularly AI in my hobby projects, it provides me feedback, proposed other libraries to use, or other solutions. It generates some classes for which I write tests. I also need to understand the code it generates. If I don't I don't use it. It does speed up my process of creation of code.

If other people also are accelerated lets say 30% then, everything is sped up, cheaper. I think many people use it AI like that. It is just a tool, like a hammer, with which you can harm yourself if you do not know how to use it.
by insane_dreamer | 2026-02-24 15:36:27+00:00
maybe we didn't care as much because we didn't have gangs of armed Gestapo-like thugs roaming the streets and abusing or killing people, ripping families apart, unaccountable to the law, and spending billions to build new concentration camps; with this camera data being sold to said secret police.

so, yeah, the stakes are different now. and if the "blue party" was the one pulling this shit I'd be just as mad
by duskdozer | 2026-02-24 15:37:22+00:00
>that means you can't disallow access to banking websites for generic-browser-on-generic-OS now. But we are, brick by brick, building a foundation where that will seem inevitable.

If you have too much non-standard stuff going on in your browser or mobile device, this is already happening, to a degree. Not a hard block, but increasing difficulties
by benmmurphy | 2026-02-24 15:37:24+00:00
i think the use case for setHTML is for user content that contains rich text and to display that safely. so this is not an alternative for escaping text or inserting text into the DOM but rather a method for displaying rich text. for example maybe you have an editor that produces em, and strong tags so now you can just whitelist those tags and use setHTML to safely put that rich text into the DOM without worrying about all the possible HTML parsing edge cases.
by taeric | 2026-02-24 15:37:53+00:00
I said that that was a fair claim. My only point on loops is you can already get some hairy explosions with "easy" to understand loops. Since those are effectively backwards jumps already.

That said, I disagree with your idea that you can't reason about it. You are just describing a flowchart that has several arrows going in different directions. Is it as easy as a flow chart that only has arrows in one direction? Of course not. But it is doable. In fact, if you allow jumping forward out of a loop, you already have most of this.

Now, can you make one that is so complicated that it can't be understood that well? Of course you can.
by touisteur | 2026-02-24 15:38:01+00:00
There's a layer above that, when CLI and bash and sed and tshark are becoming too hairy or slow, and it's 'just' parsing the pcap frames in your language of productivity. Over the years I've built layer over layer of optimized Java code to parse and analyze pcap/pcapng files with either visitor patterns or active iterations (and multi-pass analyses through indexation, or just interfacing with duckdb for months-long-capture analysis to surface low signal-to-noise-ratio events). It builds a good understanding of all the layers and brings the power of a full-featured workbench (language, IDE, libraries, visualization options...).

Built it in Java, and rebuilt it in Ada, and Rust. I find it's a good exercise to learn about a programming language... bonus point, once I have a parser, plugging it live behind libpcap, dpdk, xdp, or just raw sockets is easy.
by slashdev | 2026-02-24 15:38:45+00:00
While I have written elsewhere[1] that I think AI is causing a bubble right now, AI is also the biggest technological change to the world since the Internet.

I'm a software engineer, and I don't write code anymore. I'm still coming to terms with that, grieving the loss of my old career and getting used to the new career which is more like a technical lead and product person than a computer programmer.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47037421
by eibrahim | 2026-02-24 15:39:09+00:00
The part about vibe coding lowering the barrier to building software is well established at this point. What nobody seems to be addressing is the distribution problem that creates. We're about to have an order of magnitude more software being built, but no corresponding improvement in how people discover and evaluate it. App stores were designed for a world where shipping software was hard. We need new discovery mechanisms for a world where shipping is easy.
by emschwartz | 2026-02-24 15:39:14+00:00
This sounds interesting.

Reading your website and the investor deck, one of my main questions was "who is behind this (and is this just AI-generated)?" It would be useful to put more of a bio on there.

Not having macOS/Windows support is going to make it hard to develop with. Would it be possible to build some kind of shim on top of other libraries that mirrors the API, even if it doesn't match the performance?

Also, one of the advantages of using a popular HTTP server stack is getting lots of battle-tested middleware that other people have developed and tested. Is there any way to leverage any of that or do you need to build everything from scratch? Granted, that is certainly somewhat easier in the AI era, but still.
by namblooc | 2026-02-24 15:39:24+00:00
I'm going to chime in with some more examples of (for me) chills inducing classical music pieces:

- Mozarts Piano Concerto No. 20 in D Minor (very dark)

- Rossinis Barber of Seville Overture

- Mozarts "The Magic Flute" Overture (helps if you know the opera)

- Mozarts Symphony No. 39 in E, as soon as the allegro starts

- Schuberts Symphony No. 8 "Unfinished", the whole thing makes me want to burst with excitement
Show HN: A minimal coding agent in Elixir (Erlang/OTP)
by sergiomattei | 2026-02-24 15:39:26+00:00
Hi HN :)

Over the past couple of weeks, I got pretty intrigued by the rise of OpenClaw and agent harnesses like Pi.

At some point, I decided I wanted to make my own in order to learn how these things work. I learn by doing, and it seemed like a fun project. So I started building my own OpenClaw in TypeScript--but at some point realized I'd rather start from first principles, so instead I shifted focus towards building my own agent harness.

Something curious happened though: the more I looked at the problem space (agent system, running tools, etc)--the more it looked like Erlang/OTP to me. I had a hunch that Elixir would be a great fit for this problem.

I started building it and effectively, yes! It was a great fit. The agent loop maps perfectly to an Erlang GenServer/gen_fsm, parallel tool execution is easy by just spawning cheap Erlang processes, and multiple agents/subagents can be isolated in one system as separate supervision trees. This is all a lot of stuff I would've had to reinvent if another language was used.

Erlang/OTP is an amazing system. This setup gives me incredible observability into running agent systems--I can remote iex to the server binary and manipulate the system, end tool execution. The agent can debug itself by connecting to its own running instance. And, in the future, you can probably network these using Erlang distribution as well!

So far, in terms of features, the harness is minimal but packs a punch.

- Read/write files

- Shell calls

- Multiplatform

- Subagent support

- Asking questions

- Nice CLI :)

All in all, this project has been very fun to build. It's finally at the point where it's building itself and that's very rewarding to watch.

https://github.com/matteing/opal

Take a look at the GitHub, drop a star, and let me know any feedback? It's my first time building an agent system, so any input is welcome. Thank you!