MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Acceptify – AI personas that run user acceptance tests on your product
by oculussec | 2026-02-06 14:42:13+00:00
Hey Show HN! I built Acceptify to solve a problem I ran into while building my other app.
I’m the founder of a SaaS tool called Fortress. Early on, I had a classic issue: not enough real users yet, but I still needed feedback on whether features actually worked from a user perspective. QA and unit tests told me if the code worked — not if the experience made sense.
So I built an internal tool that creates AI personas and agents to simulate different kinds of users interacting with the product.
How it works:
1. You define a user story and acceptance criteria (similar to how product teams already write them)
2. You create AI personas (e.g. technical power user, first-time non-technical user, impatient user, etc.)
3. You give an AI agent a goal like “complete signup” or “create a project”
4. The agent explores the product autonomously, navigating, clicking, and making decisions
5. Acceptify evaluates what passed, what’s uncertain, and where behavior didn’t match expectations
It’s essentially an attempt at automated user acceptance testing that focuses on behavior and expectations, not just DOM checks or scripted flows.
Some things it surfaces well:
• Flows that technically work but are confusing
• Missing validation or feedback states
• Places where navigation or UX assumptions break
• Gaps between acceptance criteria and actual behavior
This started as an internal tool for Fortress, but I realized other product teams probably face the same “too few users, too much guesswork” problem, so I turned it into a standalone product.
It’s still early, and I’m very interested in feedback from HN folks especially around:
• How this compares to existing QA/UAT workflows you use
• Where you’d expect this to fail or hallucinate
• What would make this genuinely useful vs. just a demo
Happy to answer questions and share more technical details about how the agents and evaluation work.
Show HN: `seven up` is `vagrant up` made of sprite (Fly.io) for safe vibe-coding
by mtremsal | 2026-02-06 14:42:18+00:00
Agentic coding (CC/Codex/Cursor/etc.) works best when the assistant can autonomously "close the loop", i.e. with shell access, a browser skill and full permissions (e.g. --dangerously-skip-permissions).

The naive approach of running it locally creates massive risk, both adversarial ("lethal trifecta") and accidental (rm -fr ~/). Since the agent needs to run dependencies and Docker-in-Docker remains a nightmare, it's natural to consider the decade-old `vagrant up` workflow based on local VMs for isolation and disk snapshots. See for example Emil Burzo's "Running Claude Code dangerously (safely)", on HN not even a month ago. However in 2026 paying the overhead of local VMs, especially on ARM CPUs, feels terrible.

Enter fly.io's sprite backend: https://docs.sprites.dev/. In my (admittedly short) experience, sprites give me the best of all worlds — hardware‑isolated microVMs with fast startup, persistent disks, and checkpoint/restore — so I can keep a Vagrant‑style workflow without the VM overhead. As an added benefit, reduced latency to inference APIs makes the whole experience feel snappier.

This CLI tool provides me with a familiar command: `seven up` mirrors the old‑school `vagrant up` workflow, but is "made of sprite". Get it?

GitHub: https://github.com/1to10partners/seven

References:

* Fly.io Sprite docs: https://docs.sprites.dev/

* Fly.io Sprite announcement: https://fly.io/blog/code-and-let-live/

* Fly.io Sprite technical explainer: https://fly.io/blog/design-and-implementation/

* The “lethal trifecta” (Simon Willison): https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/9/bay-area-ai/

* My AI adoption journey (Mitchell Hashimoto): https://mitchellh.com/writing/my-ai-adoption-journey

* Running Claude Code dangerously safely (Emil Burzo): https://blog.emilburzo.com/2026/01/running-claude-code-dange...

* HN: Running Claude Code dangerously safely: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46690907

* Ask HN: How are you sandboxing coding agents? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46400129

* Run Your Agent in Firejail and Stay Safe: https://softwareengineeringstandard.com/2025/12/15/ai-agents...
by moring | 2026-02-06 14:42:21+00:00
Devil's advocate here (not associated with Duolingo, and in fact I haven't even used it):

> They reset your cleared lessons and require you to redo them if they add new vocab to them

The same would be true if that case was never considered, or postponed, during development.

I tinkered with my own toy learning platform; I too found the question of how to deal with added content to an already-completed lesson, and the answer is that there is no easy answer. Every solution sucks in a way.

> as well as randomly clearing them in the name of making you practice them again

Anki does the same, calls it "spaced repetition" and says it's a feature. Should we ban Anki now?
by chinmay185 | 2026-02-06 14:42:34+00:00
I’ve spent the last 15+ years in the trenches, first as a backend product engineer and now running an SRE/DevOps firm. One thing that consistently annoys me is the "Certification Hoarders"

These people _just_ do certifications, not actual work. Like, they can talk about all the theoretical stuff that's covered in certifications but they don't have any production experience. They haven't really _applied_ their knowledge on actual work.

Since I run my own boutique tech services company, I decided to address this "gap" by building an engineering laboratory we call Prayogshala.

Engineers should focus on "lities" - availability, maintainability, reliability, so we decided to build these habits in them ourselves.
by kodablah | 2026-02-06 14:43:03+00:00
I'm of the mind that it will be better to construct more strict/structured languages for AI use than to reuse existing ones.

My reasoning is 1) AIs can comprehend specs easily, especially if simple, 2) it is only valuable to "meet developers where they are" if really needing the developers' history/experience which I'd argue LLMs don't need as much (or only need because lang is so flexible/loose), and 3) human languages were developed to provide extreme human subjectivity which is way too much wiggle-room/flexibility (and is why people have to keep writing projects like these to reduce it).

We should be writing languages that are super-strict by default (e.g. down to the literal ordering/alphabetizing of constructs, exact spacing expectations) and only having opt-in loose modes for humans and tooling to format. I admit I am toying w/ such a lang myself, but in general we can ask more of AI code generations than we can of ourselves.
by nicoburns | 2026-02-06 14:43:07+00:00
> Do you actually believe that if your taxes went up, power would be less concentrated, or that you or your countrymen would have more power?

Absolutely. The source of most of the corruption I see in the world today is wealth, and specifically wealthy people paying people off to get their own way. If there was less wealth inequality there'd be much less scope for this.

Note: I believe this would be the case even if the money was literally burnt/disappeated rather than being given to the government (not that I suggest that's what we do).

Politics has it's fair share of corruption too. But at least in my country (the UK) it's the lesser evil. And even if you look at a country like the US where there is a lot more political corruption, the source of a lot of that seems to be private money influencing elections.
by matheusmoreira | 2026-02-06 14:43:14+00:00
I really don't like how the author minimizes the kernel anticheat situation. It's not "a lot of noise online".

It doesn't matter that user mode software is also vulnerable. We actually have mitigations against many of those user mode problems. Separate user accounts for example. Games can't exfiltrate your browser data if they can't read them.

Obviously kernel mode software can bypass all sorts of operating system controls. Bypassing those controls is the whole reason why they implement anticheat in kernel mode. If they can't bypass these controls, it means the operating system is more powerful than the anticheat, which means it can be defeated.

Yes, proprietary software is inherently untrustworthy and could be malware in disguise. Nobody disputes this, it's happened before and will happen again. It's a good idea to invest in a properly virtualized system where all those games are contained and kept completely separate from the real system. Yet another reason why we don't need idiotic anticheat software bitching about the fact it's been virtualized.
by craigtp | 2026-02-06 14:43:19+00:00
Location: Liverpool, England

Remote: Yes (Remote only)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: C#, .NET Core, ASP.NET, SQL Server/MySQL/PostgreSQL/MongoDB/EventStoreDB/Redis, RabbitMQ/Kafka, CQRS/Event Sourcing, Azure/AWS.

Résumé/CV: https://craigtp.co.uk/cv

Email: craig [at] craigtp.co.uk

Hi. I'm Craig. I'm an experienced Senior Software Engineer, Systems Architect and Microsoft Certified Professional with a passion for software development.

I work primarily, but not exclusively, with Microsoft technologies and the .NET / .NET Core frameworks, leading complex and challenging enterprise software development projects to successfully deliver robust, secure, scalable and efficient software solutions, encompassing over 30 years of experience in the field.

An accomplished team leader, mentor and architect, I'm skilled at taking a leading role in the overall architecture of a project, in driving team developments and employing proven industry disciplines and best-practices to deliver successful software projects that frequently exceed client expectations.

I'm passionate about distributed systems design, CQRS and event sourcing and a proponent of domain-driven design to ensure that solutions are laser-focused on solving real business problems. I'm an open source enthusiast and advocate using the best and most appropriate tools available, providing for an effective and pragmatic solution that delivers genuine and quantifiable business value.

Throughout my career I've helped numerous businesses of varying sizes in varying industries get their technology investment right and I can do the same for you.

Recent projects include:

+ Architected and executed a comprehensive overhaul of a core legacy system, migrating it to a robust microservices architecture. By strategically applying Domain-Driven Design, CQRS, and Event Sourcing, we enabled a prominent African FinTech company to seamlessly scale from 1 million to 10 million active users while achieving a remarkable 30%+ reduction in cloud expenses.

+ Successfully delivered an ambitious project to re-engineer a number of monolithic applications to cloud-native, event-driven distributed services for a leading hospitality software provider as part of a company-wide effort to modernise their entire software estate including training and mentoring staff on event-driven architecture and distributed system design.

+ Designed & delivered a large, global SaaS product to manage and automate music royalty collection and payment for one of the UK's largest and most demanding independent music publishers including full cloud geo-distribution & redundancy to ensure high availability & reliability for the worldwide client base.

+ Spearheaded the creation of a groundbreaking anti-motor fraud solution for a prominent UK law firm. This industry-leading platform combined a user-friendly web application, powerful API, and sophisticated data systems, including Europe's largest anti-fraud database, giving the firm an edge in fraud detection.
by carlosjobim | 2026-02-06 14:43:20+00:00
When was the last time you heard a bank owner or large industrialist being against the taxation of everyday people?

Even the famous/infamous billionaires never come out against income tax for normal people. At most they're against taxation of themselves.

When did you hear the owner of a bank or a large hedge fund or a major industry talk against income taxes which the poor pay?

The rich are 100% pro taxes. It funnels money to themselves from the population, and keeps competition down.
by xwkd | 2026-02-06 14:43:29+00:00
Over the past decade, there's been a lot of regulation forcing Apple to open up their "Apple only" integrated platforms.

It used to be the case that if Apple wanted to build a walled garden / cathedral, then in order to compete in the hardware marketplace they had to provide software that didn't suck. You knew that if you bought an Apple product, there was reasonable assurance that everything was tightly integrated. If it wasn't, you'd go buy a market alternative (Android, PC). In my mind, this means that they spent a lot of time and dev resources (i.e. money) on their Frameworks. I think it showed. Time was spent on design. They focused on opening up capabilities "the right way."

Now that's pointless. If the iPhone is just an Android phone with a different coat of paint, then dev resources are going to be shifted to a place where Apple can distinguish themselves in the market, where they have platforms that they can control: Services.
by lxgr | 2026-02-06 14:43:31+00:00
> Some one has to moderate these videos

Do they? Maybe you can never get to zero, but I'd be surprised if there weren't any ways to materially reduce the frequency of such videos being uploaded.

Of course, many of these ways will probably affect growth metrics, and since these directly translate into revenue, I can imagine how the economic tradeoff that was made here looks like...
by signatoremo | 2026-02-06 14:43:39+00:00
You trust your natural language instructions thousand times a day. If you ask for a large black coffee, you can trust that is more or less what you’ll get. Occasionally you may get something so atrocious that you don’t dare to drink, but generally speaking you trust the coffee shop knows what you want. It you insist on a specific amount of coffee brewed at a specific temperature, however, you need tools to measure.

AI tools are similar. You can trust them because they are good enough, and you need a way (testing) to make sure what is produced meet your specific requirements. Of course they may fail for you, doesn’t mean they aren’t useful in other cases.

All of that is simply common sense.
by iso1631 | 2026-02-06 14:44:11+00:00
> If Keir Starmer, or any other British Prime Minister, gave one press conference where they attacked a female journalist instead of responding to her question, and then criticized her for not smiling enough, they would be out of Downing Street within a day

Gordon Brown did an interview with a member of the public and forgot to take his microphone off when he got in the car. He said (in private) he'd just spoken to a biggoted woman. That was broadcast and it lost him the election.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/bigotgate-gor...
by jerf | 2026-02-06 14:44:29+00:00
The random-clickers have been around for a while, clicking through ads to try to break profiles on users and cost the ad networks more money than it is worth.

They have not been very successful in their goals. I suspect, without sarcasm, that that is because compared to the absolutely routine click-fraud conducted up and down the entire ad space at every level, those plugin's effects literally didn't even register. It's an arms race and people trying to use ad blockers to not just block the ads but corrupt them are coming armed with a pea shooter to an artillery fight, not because they are not very clever themselves but just without a lot of users they can't even get the needle to twitch.
by ritahuang | 2026-02-06 14:44:47+00:00
Location: Taiwan (UTC+8)

Remote: Remote/ Worldwide /can work overlap at least 4 hours within EST or work within CET

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies:

- Languages & Frameworks - Ruby, TypeScript, JavaScript, PostgreSQL, HTML/CSS, Ruby On Rails, Sinatra, Chartkick, StimulusJS, jQuery, Handlebars, Bootstrap, Tailwind CSS

- Other: Heroku, Render, Git, VS Code, User Authentication & Authorization

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/13PlJVHW7pgpM0qUvtCXfLqBeTsk...

GitHub: https://github.com/yuhruh

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yuruhuang/

Portfolio: https://pet-feeding-tracker-v4.onrender.com/

Email: yuhruhgrape@gmail.com

Hello, I'm Rita. I am an independent software engineer with over 4 years of full-stack development experience, specializing in building clear, maintainable, secure, and reliable applications with Ruby on Rails (RoR) and postgreSQL.

I recently used RoR 8, Tailwind CSS, and PostgreSQL to build the 'Pet Feeder Tracker' deployed on Render. This application is designed to help pet owners discover their pets' eating preferences and visualization of eating trends over time.
by eitland | 2026-02-06 14:45:05+00:00
In my case I was kinda OK with Google ads until around 2010 and IIRC only began blocking them actively after they had been feeding me trash ads for years.

Maybe you are right in most cases and I was the victim of a fluke.

But from what I have seen from Google after that I don't think so.

Facebook however, a company I disliked then and dislike now are scary good with their ads and have often been even even when I actively tried to avoid them.

All this to say that your theory sounds interesting but I am convinced it is far from the whole story.
by giancarlostoro | 2026-02-06 14:45:27+00:00
Some public schools in Puerto Rico started putting solar panels on their roofs after Maria which imho makes sense for all public schools all over the US / world. You have kids at school during the day, rarely during night. When schools not even open you could either put that extra power into the grid or store it for rainy seasons.

Alternatives include generating power from wind as well.
by mikewarot | 2026-02-06 14:45:52+00:00
Long, long ago I came up with a text search algorithm while working on PCxRef to help technical sales support at IBM. My first approach using a naive string search took about 30 seconds on a PC. My algorithm got it down to the speed of disk access.

Basically I precomputed a table of masks and used the XLAT instruction in a very tight loop to fly though all the product descriptions for everything IBM offered back around 1983. I could accommodate case insensitivity and single character wildcards.

The test search was always "dos tech ref" to find the IBM DOS Technical reference manual.
by myrmidon | 2026-02-06 14:45:53+00:00
> clinical trials of unproven vaccines [...] that directly caused deaths and hospitalizations of many girls

You have not shown this so far. The article that you believe supports this claim does not.

There is a lot of reasons to do a vaccine trial in India instead of the US, and a very likely one is simply cost.

If you want to accuse Gates of trying to murder Indian girls instead of Americans, then you have to show the actual harm, that there was known and disproportionate danger before the trial, and that the trial was done in India because of that danger.

So far you demonstrated none of those.

Also, please use asterisks (instead of caps lock) for emphasis (=> https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
by picklepixel | 2026-02-06 14:46:02+00:00
I built this because I pay for multiple subscriptions and I want to use them all in the same place at the same time.
HydraMCP an MCP server that connects different LLM providers such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and any local model(if you got the hardware) as a tool to be accessed by Claude Code, but here is the catch, you can use your subscription based account for any of these providers instead of an API key and therefore save yourself lots of money. basically use what you pay for on your own way.

five tools exist: you can ask a model, compare models in parallel with side by side metrics, poll models for consensus with an LLM judge to evaluate, synthesize responses from multiple models into a combined answer, list all accessible models by your providers.

happy quota burning!
Show HN: FeedFirewall – Spot rage-bait and AI slop before you rage-click
by remusnegrota | 2026-02-06 14:46:15+00:00
I kept closing social media, feeling irritated without understanding why. Turns out my feed was full of rage-bait posts designed to provoke a reaction and farm engagement. So I built a browser extension that makes the manipulation visible.

FeedFirewall runs client-side pattern matching against posts as you scroll. When it detects rage-bait, it adds an unobtrusive badge. Click the badge, and you see exactly which signals triggered: engagement bait phrases, inflammatory language, divisive framing, or platform-specific patterns. It also optionally detects AI-generated text content.

Technical details: pure client-side JS, no external API calls. Weighted scoring across pattern categories.

Works on Twitter/X, LinkedIn, Reddit (old + new), and YouTube comments. 100% local, no servers, no data collection, no accounts.

It's heuristic-based, not ML, so it has false positives and negatives. But honestly, for my own browsing, just having that moment of "oh, this post is trying to make me angry" before I engage has been worth it.

The extension is free and available in Chrome (https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/feedfirewall/dchnce...) and Firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/feedfirewall/)

The main technical question I'm wrestling with is: is weighted keyword matching too naive for this, or are heuristics sufficient when the manipulation tactics are this formulaic?
by kukkeliskuu | 2026-02-06 14:46:22+00:00
To understand the approach, you need to first understand the method it is based on.

I have written a simple introduction about it that you can download for free from simpleusm.com, no sign-up required.

Simple homegrown system for processes is not that difficult to do. You basically model the USM process model, templates as instances which you then copy as a basis for editing and make a UI around the editing.

You could even just use JSON files and git, but while the data model is not complex, it is still not simple enough for editing by hand in an editor.

Then the question is what is the benefit. I would say that just using USM to define your services is helpful.

By this approach you can build various stakeholders views to your services that are always up to date and do not require manual labor.
by pjmlp | 2026-02-06 14:46:38+00:00
Worse than that, lets remember that WG14 rejected Dennis Ritchie proposal for fat pointers, and the C authors decided it was more fun to keep their own way with other programming languages than try to improve C from WG14.

https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/varar...
by idopmstuff | 2026-02-06 14:46:51+00:00
> Meanwhile AI can't be trusted to give me a recipe for potato soup.

This just isn't true any more. Outside of work, my most common use case for LLMs is probably cooking. I used to frequently second guess them, but no longer - in my experience SOTA models are totally reliable for producing good recipes.

I recognize that at a higher level we're still talking about probabilistic recipe generation vs. deterministic compiler output, but at this point it's nonetheless just inaccurate to act as though LLMs can't be trusted with simple (e.g. potato soup recipe) tasks.
by mrmattyboy | 2026-02-06 14:47:04+00:00
Honestly, this is just awesome.

I've spent quite a long time looking at artifact storage, both for work and for personal use and this project literally scratches that itch.
So featureful (assuming they're not placeholders ;) ) and yes, Claude Code, but still - the proof will be in whether it works (and how clean the codebase feels - you're making it sound promising :D ).

Very excited to try this - well done :)
by novaleaf | 2026-02-06 14:47:10+00:00
if you enable verbose mode, it does.

However I run like 3x concurrent sessions that do multiple compacts throughout, for like 8hrs/day, and I go through a 20x subscription in about 1/2 week. So I'm extremely skeptical of these negative claims.

Edit: However I stay on top of my prompting efficiency, maybe doing some incredibly wasteful task is... wasteful?