MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by djoldman | 2026-02-08 14:45:49+00:00
Now that generative AI products are becoming more widely used, it's a little depressing how folks don't seem to view the world with a broad historical context.

The "AI effect" on the world has many similarities to previous events and in many ways changes very little about how the world works.

> I'm terrified of the good enough to ship—and I'm terrified of nobody else caring.

For almost every product/service ever offered, it was possible to scale the "quality" of the offering while largely keeping the function or outcome static. In fact, lots of capitalistic activity is basically a search for the cheapest and fastest way to accomplish a minimum set of requirements. This leads to folks (including me!!) to lament the quality of certain products/services.

For example, it's possible to make hiking boots that last a lot longer than others. But if the requirement is to have it last for just 20 miles, it's better to pay less for one that won't last as long.

Software is the same way. Most users just absolutely do not know about, care about, or worry about security, privacy, maintainability, robustness, or a host of other things. For some reason this is continually terrifying and shocking to many.

There is nothing surprising here, it's been this way for many years and will continue.

Obviously there are exceptions, but for the most part it's best to assume the above.
by cpuguy83 | 2026-02-08 14:46:42+00:00
Or, and bear with me hear, there is a problem even if you aren't experiencing it.

I've been using spotlight since it was introduced for... everything.
In Tahoe it has been absolutely terrible. Unusable.
Always indexing.
Never showing me applications which is the main thing I use it for (yes, it is configured to show applications!).
They broke something.
by coldtea | 2026-02-08 14:47:25+00:00
>That capitalism logically implies that the rich become richer? I don't think this is necessarily the case,

It doesn't need to imply anything. It's an ideology, those promoting it will say whatever BS attracts people to it. In practice, what is happening in capitalist countries since 1970s (when they abandoned all pretense) is that the rich get way richer and everybody else is fucked.
by Foreignborn | 2026-02-08 14:47:47+00:00
I _really_ think you have an interesting tool, but the workflow loop isn't fully there.

Please let me revise or remix a suggested node. I find them extremely engaging, and I can envision ways of sort of "spinning off" even further than it's suggestions. Think Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies.

To me, this is hinting at really interesting creative processes that feel much more humane than how most LLMs work today.
by simonw | 2026-02-08 14:47:48+00:00
I really feel this. I can make meaningful progress on half a dozen projects in the course of a day now but I end the day exhausted.

I've had conversations with people recently who are losing sleep because they're finding building yet another feature with "just one more prompt" irresistible.

Decades of intuition about sustainable working practices just got disrupted. It's going to take a while and some discipline to find a good new balance.
by nerdsniper | 2026-02-08 14:47:50+00:00
I can't find which benchmarks those scores are from. It looks like sometimes they might have been comparing gaming FPS to AMDs paired with Nvidia 5090's? Something feels off about the site you linked - the methodology and scores aren't even cursorily explained, and gaming scores don't make sense. The 5600X doesn't even have an iGPU and the GFX card they had to have paired with it isn't listed.

What does "single core gaming performance" even mean for a CPU that doesn't have an iGPU? How could that not be a category error to compare against Apple Silicon?

I was looking at https://www.cpubenchmark.net/single-thread/
by the_harpia_io | 2026-02-08 14:48:11+00:00
defense in depth makes sense - microVM as the boundary, seccomp as insurance. most docs treat seccomp like it's the whole story which is... optimistic.

the opus 4.6 breakouts you mentioned - was it known vulns or creative syscall abuse? agents are weirdly systematic about edge cases compared to human red teamers. they don't skip the obvious stuff.

--privileged for buildkit tracks - you gotta build the images somewhere.
by zachdotai | 2026-02-08 14:48:49+00:00
I think for the first time ever, we are facing a paradigm shift in containment/sandboxing.

Just as Docker became the de facto standard for cloud containerization, we are seeing a lot of solutions attempting to sandbox AI agents. But imo there is a fundamental difference: previously, we sandboxed static processes. Now, we are attempting to sandbox something that potentially has the agency and reasoning capabilities to try and get itself out.

It’s going to be super interesting (and frankly exciting) to see how the security landscape evolves this time around.
Ask HN: OpenClaw vs. Claude Cowork – local skills vs. MCP integrations?
by lazyxyz | 2026-02-08 14:49:28+00:00
Been using both OpenClaw and Claude Cowork for automating workflows and noticed they take fundamentally different approaches to extensibility.
OpenClaw relies on local skills — scripts that run on your machine, read files, control browsers, execute shell commands. Powerful for local automation, but everything runs in your environment and you're limited to what someone has written as a skill.
Claude Cowork supports MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers, which opens up a completely different model. With something like Composio/Rube, Cowork can directly interact with 500+ apps — Slack, GitHub, Google Workspace, Twitter, Notion, CRMs — all through authenticated API connections. No scraping, no brittle browser automation, just native tool calls. It can also chain these together: read a GitHub PR, summarize it in Slack, create a follow-up task in Asana, all in one workflow.
The gap feels significant. OpenClaw gives you a self-hosted Swiss Army knife for local tasks. Claude Cowork with MCP gives you an orchestration layer that talks to your entire SaaS stack natively.
For those using either or both — is the MCP approach as much of a leap forward as it seems? Or does the self-hosted flexibility of OpenClaw still win for certain use cases?
by netsharc | 2026-02-08 14:49:41+00:00
I lived in Germany, and movies are dubbed there, so the TV stayed mostly off. I did turn on the TV once. There was a movie that looked half interesting, so I focused on it. The scene was two guys at the airport to pick up a girl who they had a crush on in highschool. They're waiting for her at the arrivals. "There she is!", cut to... not the girl walking in looking all glorius, but a beer ad. I turned it off and looked for the movie on Torrent.
by LtdJorge | 2026-02-08 14:50:23+00:00
Hmm, for most desktop stuff, you're still limited to random access, where even if leagues above HDD, the NVMe still suck compared to sequential. It's sad that intel killed Optane/3D X-point, because those are mych better at random workloads and they had still lower latencies than the latest NVMe (not by much anymore).
by gom_jabbar | 2026-02-08 14:50:39+00:00
Exactly. As Nick Land wrote:

"Robotic security. [...] The armed mass as a model for the revolutionary citizenry declines into senselessness, replaced by drones. Asabiyyah ceases entirely to matter, however much it remains a focus for romantic attachment. Industrialization closes the loop, and protects itself." [0]

The important part here is that "[i]ndustrialization [...] protects itself". This is not about protecting humans ultimately. Humans are not autonomous, but ultimately functions of (autonomous) capital. Mark Fisher put it like this:

"Capital will not be ultimately unmasked as exploited labour power; rather, humans are the meat puppet of Capital, their identities and self-understandings are simulations that can and will be ultimately be sloughed off." [1]

[0] Nick Land (2016). The NRx Moment in Xenosystems Blog. Retrieved from github.com/cyborg-nomade/reignition

[1] Mark Fisher (2012). Terminator vs Avatar in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, Urbanomic, p. 342.
by nic547 | 2026-02-08 14:50:59+00:00
Assuming you have the yellowish, metal tracks (M-Track) it should work more or less.

Electrically the tracks with the connectors for power might have capacitors for radio interference reasons, they're unnecessary for and cause problems with the digital signals.

With regards to the wheel-track geometry, Märklin hasn't changed that much and most modern rolling stock compatible with the "Märklin system" (commonly referred to as "3L"/"AC") should work on M-track. Only the small "industrial radius" tracks might be a bit problematic in general and longer cars can hit turnout signals (mostly a problem with long passenger cars that aren't shortened to 1/100 or 1/93.5 scale).
Some manufacturers have created "universal" wheelsets, those might be prone to derailments.

Digital trains need clean rails for proper operation, m-track is more vulnerable to rust and really needs proper rust removal, especially after not being used for a while.|

AFAIK it's not that rare to use m-track for storage yards and "non-visible" track rather than throwing it away.
by losvedir | 2026-02-08 14:51:42+00:00
I think the "software factory" terminology is very interesting, and I would imagine quite intentional.

It calls to mind the early days of the industrial revolution, when I believe the idea was that mass produced items were not better quality, just dramatically cheaper. So you still had the artisans that the rich people paid for but now poorer people had access to something they couldn't before.

Then, as technology progressed, factories started producing things that humans are incapable of. And part of this is because those factories were built on output of earlier factories.

It makes me wonder if this is where we're headed. Right now the code quality of agents isn't better than hand written code, and so arguably the products aren't either. But will there come a time when it surpasses what we can do? You can't handcraft a microchip, for example. But I guess the takeaway is maybe there's a time for both agentic lower quality but cheaper output and human software engineer higher quality output, at least for a time.
by jeremyjh | 2026-02-08 14:52:23+00:00
This feels different. In the 1950s rapid technological progress had been driven by the pressures of the second world war and produced amazing things that held a lot of promise, but few appreciated the depth of complexity of what lay before them. A lot of that complexity had to be solved with software which expanded the problem set rather than solving it. If we have a general solution to the problem of software, we don't know that there are other barriers that would slow progress so much.
by veganmosfet | 2026-02-08 14:52:26+00:00
It's still bad, even if they fixed some low hanging fruits. Main issue: prompt injection when using the LLM "user" channel with untrusted content (even with countermeasures and frontier model) combined with insecure config / plugins / skills... I experimented with it: https://veganmosfet.github.io/2026/02/02/openclaw_mail_rce.h...
by ajb | 2026-02-08 14:52:37+00:00
We definitely need a vendor-independent tool like this. Have been reviewing the Claude setup and, despite initially being hopeful since it uses bubblewrap, it's quite problematic:

* The definitions of security config in the documentation of settings.json are unclear. Since it's not open source, you can't check the ground truth.

* The built in constructs are insufficient to do fully whitelist based access control (It might be possible with a custom hook).

* Security related issues go unanswered in the repo, and are automatically closed.

Haven't looked into copilot as much but didn't look great either. Seems like the vendors don't have the incentives to do this properly.

So I'm on the lookout for a better way, and matchlock seems like a contender.
by trentnix | 2026-02-08 14:52:46+00:00
Midwits love this kind of stuff. Movie critics heap praise on forgettable movies to get their names and quotes on the movie poster. Robert Scoble made an entire career in tech bloviation hyping the current thing and got invited to the coolest parties. LinkedIn is a word salad conveyor belt of this kind of useless nonsense.

It's a racket never ends.
by ozmodiar | 2026-02-08 14:52:51+00:00
Part of it is also that when we look back we think of people's suffering as sacrifices that needed to be made. Now that it's us being sacrificed it really shifts a lot of people's perspective. I think we need a better solution than letting a bunch of people get fucked so that some other set of people in the right place can have shinier toys in the future. Society needs to handle these transitions better, especially as technology raises the stakes with mass servailance and nuclear weapons.
by mothballed | 2026-02-08 14:53:30+00:00
Basically, because the military got a massive budget in WWII and Americans just got used to it because slaughtering the Nazis was the only thing that can convince Americans to buy into that level of welfare.

Now it's mostly a jobs program for poor people plus pork for politicians to throw at their favored contractors/companies. Can't really be eliminated without political suicide because too many mouths are fed off of it and will make it their mission every waking moment to damn anyone who tries to do it.

Since prevention is a lot cheaper than cure we're trying to avoid the same mistake with other things rather than commit political supuku on things that already exist.
by parpfish | 2026-02-08 14:55:32+00:00
For me the fatigue is a little different— it’s the constant switching between doing a little bit of work/coding/reviewing and then stopping to wait for the llm to generate something.

The waits are unpredictable length, so you never know if you should wait or switch to a new task. So you just do something to kill a little time while the machine thinks.

You never get into a flow state and you feel worn down from this constant vigilance of waiting for background jobs to finish.

I dont feel more productive, I feel like a lazy babysitter that’s just doing enough to keep the kids from hurting themselves
by steveBK123 | 2026-02-08 14:55:33+00:00
It feels like the 2000s era of “Mac software is better but you have to tolerate their hardware to enjoy it” has inverted in the last 5 years. Incredible hardware down to in-house silicon, but software that would have given Steve Jobs a stroke.

Firstly performance issues like wtf is going on with search. Then there seems to be a need to constantly futz with stable established apps UXes every annual OS update for the sake of change. Moving buttons, adding clicks to workflows, etc.

My most recent enraging find was the date picker in the reminders app. When editting a reminder, there is an up/down arrow interface to the side of the date, but if you click them they change the MONTH. Who decided that makes any sense. In what world is bumping a reminder by a month the most common change? It’s actually worse than useless, its actively net negative.
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2026-02-08 14:55:44+00:00
> I've had conversations with people recently who are losing sleep because they're finding building yet another feature with "just one more prompt" irresistible.

My problem is - before, I'd get ideas, start something, and it would either become immediately obvious it wouldn't be worth the time, or immediately obvious that it wouldn't turn out well / how I thought.

Now, the problem is, everything starts off so incredibly well and goes smoothly... Until it doesn't.
by deanc | 2026-02-08 14:55:46+00:00
All the problems highlighted with agentic coding are problems you face when working as a team of humans. Apply the same
principles:

- Break down big problems into smaller ones

- Create extensive plan + documentation (context)

- Make sure some parts of the plan if possible can be done simultaneously and not create too many dependencies.

- Define success criteria (tests?)

Then just unleash the agents. The more you put in, the more you get out.
by keraf | 2026-02-08 14:56:01+00:00
When my parents built a new house, they wanted to get smart home features and got quoted 12k CHF (pretty much same as USD) for a crappy proprietary system.

I asked them for 1/4th of that amount to buy hardware and do it myself. My philosophy when designing it, is that everything that is "smart" should have a non-smart backup. You can trigger the lights via an app or the tablet, but the switch on the wall also works. The garage can be opened remotely and automatically when the car approaches, but there's a physical radio remote that still does the job independently of the smart home system. You can set the blinds exactly at the level you want from the app, but the remote is always around if you need it. And so on.

The idea was that if the system goes down, everything should still work. But it also made me realise that the convenience of having both options is what my parents love the most. They mostly interact with things using the non-smart controls, but love to know that they can monitor and interact with these same things from anywhere.
by meandmycode | 2026-02-08 14:56:08+00:00
I personally went with https://endeavouros.com/ in the end, so far working really great, I appreciate Linux distributions will have different audiences which is great, I think regardless of distribution though it seems like a lot more software (and hardware) is 'just working' and it's actually delightful to use the computer again, kudos to many hard working people making free software
by wavemode | 2026-02-08 14:56:33+00:00
Slop existed before AI came along.

It's often lamented that the World Wide Web used to be controlled by indie makers, but now belongs to a handful of megacorp websites and ad networks pushing addictive content. But, the indie maker era was just a temporary market inefficiency, from before businesses fully knew how to harness the technology.

I think software development has gone through a similar change. At one point software companies cared about software quality, but this too was just an idealist, engineer-driven market inefficiency. Eventually business leaders realized they can make just as much money (but make it faster) by shoveling out rushed, bloated, garbage software, since even though poor-quality software aggravates people, it doesn't aggravate enough for the average person to switch vendors over it. (Case in point - I'm regularly astounded at how buggy the YouTube app is on Android of all platforms. I have to force-kill it semi-regularly to get it working right. But am I gonna stop watching YouTube because of this? Admittedly, no, probably not.)
by obsidianbases1 | 2026-02-08 14:56:44+00:00
> how it is helping them

This should be the opening for every post about the various "innovations" in the space.

Preferably with a subsequent line about the manual process that was worth putting the extra effort into prior to the shiny new thing.

I really can imagine a better UX then opening my calendar in one-click and manual scanning.

Another frequent theme is "tell me the weather." One again, Google home (alexa or whatever) handles it while I'm still in bed and let's me go longer without staring at a screen.

The spam use-case is probably the best use-case I've seen, as in it truly saves time for an equal or better result, but that means being cool with being a spammer.
by wesm | 2026-02-08 14:57:09+00:00
I've been building https://roborev.io/ (continuous background code review for agents) essentially as a cope to supervise the poor quality of the agents' work, since my agents write much more code than I can possible review directly or QA thoroughly. I think we'll see a bunch of interesting new tools to help alleviate the cognitive burden of supervising their work output.
by anon291 | 2026-02-08 14:58:22+00:00
You don't? There's nothing special about monads. I don't know why everyone cares so much about them.

There are a few generic transforms you can use to avoid boilerplate. You can reason about your code more easily if your monad follows all the monad laws. But let's be real.. most programmers don't know how to reason about their code anyway, so it's a moot point
by antirez | 2026-02-08 14:58:23+00:00
1. Make long pauses: 1h of work, stop for 30 minutes or more. The productivity gain should leave you more time to rest. Alternatively work just 50% of time, 2h the morning, 2h the evening, instead of 8 hours. Yet trying to deliver more than before.

2. Don't mix N activities. Work in a very focused way in a single project, doing meaningful progresses.

3. Don't be too open-ended in the changes you do just because you can do it in little time now. Do what really matters.

4. When you are away, put an agent in the right rails to reiterate and provide potentially some very good result in terms of code quality, security, speed, testing, ... This increases the productivity without stressing you. When you return back, inspect the results, discard everything is trash, take the gems, if any.

5. Be minimalistic even if you no longer write the code. Prompt the agent (and your AGENT.md file) to be focused, to don't add useless dependencies, nor complexity, to take the line count low, to accept an improvement only the complexity-cost/gain is adequate.

6. Turn your flow into specification writing. Stop and write your specifications even for a long time, without interruptions. This will improve a lot the output of the coding agents. And it is a moment of calm focused work for you.
Show HN: Brandlint – AI reviewer that catches off-brand copy in PRs
by tonychx | 2026-02-08 14:59:04+00:00
in every product team i've worked at, engineers rarely pay attention to product copy. it ends up inconsistent, and then you waste time going back and forth with marketing to fix it.

so i built brandlint, a github app that reviews PRs for off-brand copy, suggests fixes, and lets you apply them with one click.

how it works:

1. define your brand voice (or pick a template)

2. connect your repos

3. every PR gets reviewed automatically

tech: next.js, convex, claude, stripe.

free tier: 1 repo, 20 PRs/mo. paid from $19/mo.

would love honest feedback. is this a real problem for your team?
by maxerickson | 2026-02-08 14:59:22+00:00
Andy has to be innocent for his escape (and bringing down of the warden) to be a redemption. It's a redemption of his life against the injustice he was subjected to, not a redemption of his soul for some evil that he committed.

If he was a double murderer, plotting to and successfully escaping isn't a redemption, it's just a murderer getting away with it.
by coldtea | 2026-02-08 14:59:58+00:00
I started programming 40 years ago as well. The magic for me was never that "you could talk to your computer and it had a personality".

That was the layman version of computing, something shown to the masses in movies like War Games and popular media, one that we mocked.

I also lived through the FOSS peak. The current proprietary / black-box / energy lock in would be seen as the stuff of nightmares.
by jezzamon | 2026-02-08 15:00:08+00:00
Task switching sucks.

On the other side, I feel like using AI tools can reduce the cognitive overload of doing a single task, which can be nice. If you're able to work with a tool that's fast enough and just focus on a single task at a time, it feels like it makes things easier. When you try to parallelize that's when things get messier.

There's a negative for that too - cognitive effort is directly correlated with learning, so it means that your own skills start to feel less sharp too as you do that
by nerdsniper | 2026-02-08 15:00:28+00:00
https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-list/cinebench-scores

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/single-thread/

https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks vs https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks

Apple leads all of these in single core, by a significant margin. Even at geekbench.com (3398 for AMD 9950X3D vs ~4000 for various Apple chips)