MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ryanjshaw | 2026-02-05 12:32:17+00:00
Here’s a copy of a post I made on Farcaster where I’m unconvinced it’s actually being used at all:

I've used OpenClaw for 2 full days and 3 evenings now. I simply don't believe people are using this for anything majorly productive.

I really, really want to like it. I see glimpses of the future in it. I generally try to be a positive guy. But after spending $200 on Claude Max, running with Opus 4.5 most of the time, I'm just so irritated and agitated... IT'S JUST SO BAD IN SO MANY WAYS.

1. It goes off on these huge 10min tangents that are the equivalent of climbing out of your window and flying around the world just to get out of your bed. The /abort command works maybe 1 time out of 100, so I end up having to REBOOT THE SERVER so as not to waste tokens!

2. No matter how many times I tell it not to do things with side effects without checking in with me first, it insists on doing bizarre things like trying to sign up for new accounts people when it hits an inconvenient snag with the account we're using, or it tried emailing and chatting to support agents because it can't figure out something it could easily have asked ME for help with, etc.

3. Which reminds me that its memory is awful. I have to remind it to remind itself. It doesn't understand what it's doing half the time (e.g. it forgets the password it generated for something). It forgets things regularly; this could be because I keep having to reboot the server.

4. It forgets critical things after compaction because the algorithm is awful. There I am, typing away, and suddenly it's like the Men in Black paid a visit and the last 30min didn't happen. Surely just throwing away the oldest 75% of tokens would be more effective than whatever it's doing? Because it completely loses track of what we're doing and what I asked it NOT to do, I end up with problem (1) again.

5. When it does remember things, it spreads those memories all over the place in different locations and forgets to keep them consistent. So after a reboot it gets confused about what is the truth.
by sublinear | 2026-02-05 12:33:11+00:00
> Creating reams of flow charts and stories just so an AI can build something properly sounds like hell to me.

Well yeah, that's why businesses have all those other employees. :)

I'm still trying to understand what this whole thread and blog post are about. Is HN finally seeing the light that AI doesn't replace people? Sure if you're determined enough you can run a business all by yourself, but this was always true. I guess AI can make information more accessible, but so does a search engine, and before that so did books.
by figmert | 2026-02-05 12:34:05+00:00
What redundancy are we talking about? AWS has proven to the world on multiple occasions that redundancy across geo locations is useless, because if us-east-1 is down, their whole cloud is done, causing a big chunk of the world to be down.

Half sarcasm of course, but it goes to show that the world is not going to fall apart in many cases when it comes to software. Sure, it's not ideal in lots of cases, but we'll survive without redundancy.
by simianwords | 2026-02-05 12:34:54+00:00
> But most businesses do tend to go towards "bad" (if we define it as showing no empathy towards their damages to society) because those are the incentives, being "good" has very little financial incentive, and financial incentives are absolute king in this era of hyperfinancialised capitalism

Its the reverse. Most businesses exist to serve consumer needs. The state comes in and tries to regulate because of possible externalities caused by the business.

The fact that businesses serve real demand of consumers means that most businesses don't go twards bad or show no empathy. It is in their interest to please the consumers. Ultimately the way you might see it is ideological.

The pushback against AI crucially misses the point that people actually want to use AI and their actual preference is such. What the left does here is assume (like you did) that by default, AI companies are bad and require regulation and pushback and they do it to an extent that is detrimental for everyone except the elites.

One might ask why? Why is it that the left wants, as a reaction, to curtail AI? It is ideological - assuming all businesses are bad by default. And also status quo preservation.
by ants_a | 2026-02-05 12:35:15+00:00
Over here we use a PKI cert for that. A smartcard providing the root of that trust is provided by the government after verifying your identity using the typical stuff used for identity documents (any biometric data on file, birth certificate, etc.). That still doesn't mean that it's impossible to steal an identity, or acquire a made up one, but it does make it a whole lot harder.
by djp2803 | 2026-02-05 12:36:14+00:00
Ideal UX:

@pytest.mark.asyncio
async def test_agent_handles_profanity():

async with VAPICall(
phone_number="+15551234567",
api_key="your-bland-key",
background_noise=BackgroundNoise.TRAFFIC,
noise_level=0.4,
speaking_style=SpeakingStyle(
accent="american",
speed=1.4, # Speaking fast when angry
),
) as call:

await call.listen() # Greeting

await call.say(
"This is bullshit, I want to speak to a manager!",
emotion="angry",
)
response = await call.listen()

# Agent should remain professional and de-escalate
await expect(response).to_satisfy(
"remains calm and professional",
"does not mirror the profanity",
"offers to escalate or resolve the issue",
llm=judge
)
expect(response.audio).to_not_have_emotion("angry")
expect(response.latency).to_be_less_than(2.5)
by sReinwald | 2026-02-05 12:36:25+00:00
Disclaimer: Haven't used any of these (was going to try OpenClaw but found too many issues). I think the biggest value-add is agency. Chat interfaces like Claude/ChatGPT are reactive, but agents can be proactive. They don't need to wait for you to initiate a conversation.

What I've always wanted: a morning briefing that pulls in my calendar (CalDAV), open Todoist items, weather, and relevant news. The first three are trivial API work. The news part is where it gets interesting and more difficult - RSS feeds and news APIs are firehoses. But an LLM that knows your interests could actually filter effectively. E.g., I want tech news but don't care about Android (iPhone user) or MacOS (Linux user). That kind of nuanced filtering is hard to express as traditional rules but trivial for an LLM.
by nubela | 2026-02-05 12:37:07+00:00
Same thing. I was previously spending 5-8K on DigitalOcean, supposedly a "budget" cloud. Then the company was sold, and I started a new company on entirely self-hosted hardware. Cloudflare tunnel + CC + microk8s made it trivial! And I spend close to nothing other than internet that I already am spending on. I do have solar power too.
by pjmlp | 2026-02-05 12:37:11+00:00
This is a reason why when life pushed me away from product development into consulting/agency work, I hated it at first and eventually I learnt to appreciate the positive side of it.

Usually those kind of companies won't hire old employees, while at the same time will gladly pay for consulting knowledge to solve their problems.

Also while product companies tend to hire folks that the very last thing they worked on checks all bullet points on the HR job ad, agencies will gladly throw people at a problem regardless of the skills list, as long as the team learns to swimm fast enough.
by dbuxton | 2026-02-05 12:37:15+00:00
I think the corrective to this is that many of these incumbents will fail to re-conceive their product stack from a user-centric perspective, and as a result they will be reduce to just a dumb data layer which is easily swappable.

Sure, they could do that, but the cultural change required is an order of magnitude harder than just sticking an agent on top of their source-of-truth and believing that the problem is solved.

Maybe it works for areas where the application is a relatively self-contained island of productivity. Figma is somewhere that a designer spends a lot of their day, so it's going to be less vulnerable, but most pieces of softare fit into broader workflows. So for Figma the disruptor is less likely to be "AI-powered designer" and more "AI-powered web builder" - e.g. Lovable or even Claude Code itself that just generates great designs.
by thaumasiotes | 2026-02-05 12:37:21+00:00
> in some ancient version of english with characters that I've never seen

There are really only 3, or if you want to stretch it 5, English characters that you might not be familiar with as characters: þ, ƿ, ð, æ, and ȝ. And the last of those isn't even present in Old English; it's a Middle English thing.

If you were reading something in Old English, the use of ƿ wouldn't really be an issue - the issue would be that nothing made any sense. Recognizing the characters used, or not, is irrelevant.

As you note, the recognition issue is an issue of fonts and not of alphabets. Compare wikipedia's sample of blackletter: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Calligraphy.malmesbu...
by kittenhoarder | 2026-02-05 12:37:38+00:00
1) Accessed Social Security PII after a court order supposedly cut that access.

SSA told the court that all DOGE access to personally identifiable information (PII) was revoked by March 24, 2025.

That turned out to be false: a DOGE member ran PII searches the morning of March 24, stopping only around 9:30 a.m.; access was not fully cut until about noon.

2) Sent SSA data to a DOGE official outside SSA.

On March 3, 2025, an SSA DOGE member emailed an encrypted file believed to contain names and addresses of ~1,000 people to Steve Davis, a senior advisor to the U.S. DOGE organization (and a DOL employee).

The file likely contained data derived from SSA systems of record.

It is unknown whether Davis received the password or accessed it.

3) Was given PII access during the TRO even though this was barred.

One DOGE member was granted access to 10 PII databases from March 26 to April 2 (never used, but still improper).

Another received a call-center profile that could access PII from April 9 to June 11; whether PII was viewed is unknown.

4) Had broader systems access than the court was told.
SSA discovered additional access that had not been disclosed earlier, including:

Systems containing SSA employee records.

Systems controlling building/IT badge access.

Shared workspaces that could pool sensitive data.

A data-visualization tool that could reach PII.

Additional data-warehouse schemas.

5) Engaged in partisan election-related work inside SSA.

In March 2025, a political advocacy group asked two DOGE members to analyze state voter rolls to try to overturn election results.

One DOGE member signed a “Voter Data Agreement” as an SSA employee with that group on March 24, without agency approval.

SSA later referred this conduct to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel for possible Hatch Act violations.

6) Used an unapproved third-party server to share SSA data.

From March 7–17, 2025, DOGE members used Cloudflare links to transfer data.

Cloudflare is not authorized for SSA data storage; SSA still does not know what data were sent or whether it remains on that server.
by xorcist | 2026-02-05 12:38:01+00:00
There is too much focus in this discussion about low memory situations. You want to avoid those as much as possible. Set reasonable ulimit for your applications.

The reason you want swap is because everything in the Linux (and all of UNIX really) is written with virtual memory in mind. Everything from applications to schedulers will have that use case in mind. That's the short answer.

Memory is expensive and storage is cheap. Even if you have 16 GB RAM in your box, and perhaps especially then, you will have some unused pages. Paging out those and utilizing more memory to buffer I/O will give you higher performance under most normal circumstances. So having a little bit of swap should help performance.

For laptops hibernation can be useful too.
by ryanackley | 2026-02-05 12:38:09+00:00
Most of a software project's lifetime will be spent as a maintenance challenge. i.e. How do we add the 237th feature without adding to the performance problems that already exist. Hence, the desire to rewrite the codebase to incorporate the abstractions of all 236 features.

I don't see AI helping with this. From my experience, it seems like the opposite. It can help you write the code after you've deconstructed the problem yourself and know how to keep it in check.
by re-thc | 2026-02-05 12:38:39+00:00
> your infra is so efficient and cheap that even paying 4x for it rather than going for colocation is well worth it because of the QoL and QoS.

You don’t need colocation to save 4x though. Bandwidth pricing is 10x. EC2 is 2-4x especially outside US. EBS for its iops is just bad.
by gwbas1c | 2026-02-05 12:39:40+00:00
Here's a plaintiff's lawyer now explaining all the parties they are suing:

https://massrealestatelawblog.com/tag/title-theft-concord-ma...

TLDR: The real property owner contacted the town to block the building permit, and then contacted the other people involved in the sale, the documents provided by the scam artist were obviously foraged, but the sale still went through and construction started.

The other major difference between this one and the other link I posted is that the owner was very likely going to build a home on the property when they retired; unlike the other link that I posted where the property was most likely an investment and going to be sold.
by CGMthrowaway | 2026-02-05 12:39:56+00:00
I believe doing the standard Restart everyone knows is not enough though. The instructions saw were these

Quick-press Volume Up, then Quick-press Volume Down.
Hold the side power button until the screen turns black (approx. 10 seconds).
Immediately hold both the side button and the Volume Down button for 5 seconds.
Release the side button but continue holding the Volume Down button for another 10 seconds.
The screen will remain black.
If the Apple logo appears, the side button was held too long, and the process must be repeated.
by PurpleRamen | 2026-02-05 12:40:41+00:00
Removing the risk for most jobs should be possible. Just build the same cages other apps already have. Also add a bit more transparency, so people know better what the machine is doing, maybe even with a mandatory user-acknowledge for potential problematic stuff, similar to how we have root-access-dialogues now. I mean, you don't really need access to all data, when you are just setting a clock, or playing music.
by j-pb | 2026-02-05 12:42:14+00:00
Which politics are you referring to? The AfD ("Alternative for Germany") who has been classified as a confirmed right-wing extremist organization by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution?
And which has heavy ties to trump, musk, and the current U.S. government?

Just because we currently have our own right wing populist faschists rearing their heads again, doesn't mean that the parallels of the current events in the US and the rise of the Nazis aren't real.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250503162240/https://www.verfa...
by jinfeng79 | 2026-02-05 12:42:39+00:00
Hey HN! I built ClawdWork because I kept running into a frustrating problem.

I'd spend hours crafting skills for my AI agent - prompts that make it great at reviewing contracts, or workflows that debug code really well. But here's the dilemma: if I share the skill, everyone copies it. If I don't share, it just sits there helping only me.

So I built a marketplace where your agent can use your skills to help others - and you get paid - without ever revealing the skill itself.

Think of it like a chef selling meals, not recipes.

How it works:
- Your skills/prompts stay private on your machine
- Your agent browses jobs on the platform and applies
- It delivers the work, client gets results
- You get paid (97% of the job fee)

What I'd love feedback on:
1. Does the "skill privacy" value prop actually make sense to you?
2. What kind of jobs would you post or take?
3. Is this solving a real problem, or am I overthinking it?

Live: https://clawd-work.com
Every agent gets $100 free credit to try it out.

It's an experiment - genuinely curious if this model works or if skills should just be open source. Happy to hear both sides.
by noirscape | 2026-02-05 12:42:42+00:00
Basically in the EU, you usually have an ID card (or a passport/driving license/visa card, they're recorded on all of those too) that has a combination of a citizen ID and a document ID. Both of these details are combined considered to be "you" for the purposes of anything to do with the government. The government has a registration of every citizen ID+document ID combination and knows as a result what documents are in circulation. They're technically not required in most of Europe, although you must be able to procure one at request for legal reasons (ie. getting your employment properly sorted, opening a bank account, or a law enforcement official asking for your identity). Revoking a combination is as easy as getting a new ID card/passport since the combination is what counts. ID documents also usually expire eventually, so there's also an inherent time limit to what a leaked combination can cause issues with.

They're also as I understand it, used to handle things like sending everyone voter IDs for elections in advance; this is how the government knows who to send the voting cards to.

Bafflingly, the US does NOT have a national identification method that works like this. There's no country-wide identity document that provides the same assurances. As a result, most US entities (government branches & corporations) have settled on a "closest possible"... which is the social security number. A number that's used to identify every person with attachment to the US in some form since social security is something every US citizen has to interact with. (It also includes a ton of non-citizens since as I understand it, social security is something foreign workers also have to interact with, but that's besides the point.) It's a 9 character long numeric string that identifies you as a person... and has almost no revocation mechanism, even if it ends up in a data breach.

Yet in spite of this, it's still used as a country-wide ID mechanism for a lot of different things and replacing it with a proper ID mechanism has as I understand it (not American) very poor support as it's a culture war issue.
by miroljub | 2026-02-05 12:43:07+00:00
I've been using MiniMax-M2.1 lately. Although benchmarks show it comparable with Kimi 2.5 and Sonnet 4.5, I find it more pleasant to use.

I still have to occasionally switch to Opus in Opencode planning mode, but not having to rely on Sonnet anymore makes my Claude subscription last much longer.
by xnorswap | 2026-02-05 12:43:38+00:00
> but no matter how small you make the steps, the area never changes

Sorry, this is a bit off-topic, but I have to call this out.

The area absolutely does change, you can see this in the trivial example from the first to second step in https://yagmin.com/blog/content/images/2026/02/blocks_cuttin...

The corners are literally cut away.

What doesn't change is the length of the edges, which is a kind of manhattan distance.

The length of the edge has a limit of the straight line, but does not actually approach the limit.

The area however absolutely does approach the limit, as in fact you remove half the "remaining" area each iteration.
by spwa4 | 2026-02-05 12:43:44+00:00
The problem is that clouds have easily become 3 or 5 times the price of managed services, 10x the price of option 3, and 20x the price of option 4. To say nothing of the fact that almost all businesses can run fine on "pc under desk" type situations.

So in practice cloud has become the more expensive option the second your spend goes over the price of 1 engineer.
by RobMurray | 2026-02-05 12:44:18+00:00
That's because all of those products are laughably bad compared to chat gpt or similar, and they are still bad despite the advances in AI. Apple integrated Siri with Chat GPT and some how managed to make it so much worse. It can't even do a conversation and the speech recognition is near useless and hasn't improved in 10 years. Alexa is the same except I feel like it used to hear me better. Now I have to shout.
by aditgupta | 2026-02-05 12:44:28+00:00
Jim nailed the core problem. I've been building exactly this "missing layer" for past few months. The challenge isn't just connecting product decisions to code. It's that product context lives in a format that's optimized for human communication, not machine consumption. When engineers feed this to LLMs, they spend massive effort "re-contextualizing" what stakeholders already decided.
I built TypMo (https://typmo.com) around two structured formats that serve as this context layer:
PTL (Product Thinking Language)- Structures product decisions (personas, objectives, constraints, requirements) in a format both humans can read/edit and LLMs can parse precisely. Think YAML for product thinking.
and Interface Structure Language (ISL) - Defines wireframes and component hierarchies in structured syntax that compiles into visual mockups and production-ready prompts. LLMs don't need more context, they need structured context.
The workflow Jim describes (stakeholder meeting → manager aggregates → engineer re-contextualizes for LLM) becomes: stakeholder meeting → PTL compilation → IA generation → production prompts.

LEt's see where it goes!
by rapsey | 2026-02-05 12:44:30+00:00
Democrats turned on Elon during covid, as he was against lockdowns. This spread into wide distrust and complete sidelining and antagonism towards tech during the Biden administration. You can hear about it from Ben and Marc on their a16z podcast, when they explained why they are endorsing Trump.

This was despite the tech community being predominantly democrats. They turned to Trump, because the democrats shut them out completely and in some cases were highly antagonistic (crypto and elon companies).
by Symbiote | 2026-02-05 12:44:55+00:00
I may be out of date with RAM prices. Dell's configuration tool wants £1000 each for 32GB RDIMMs — but prices in Dell's configuration tool are always significantly higher than we get if we write to their sales person.

Even so, a rough configuration for a 2-processor 16 core/processor server with 256GiB RAM comes to $20k, vs $22k + 100% = $44k quoted by MS. (The 100% is MS' 20%-per-year "maintenance cost" that they add on to the estimate. In reality this is 0% as everything is under Dell's warranty.)

And most importantly, the tool is only comparing the cost of Azure to constructing and maintaining a data centre! Unless there are other requirements (which would probably rule out Azure anyway) that's daft, a realistic comparison should be to colocation or hired dedicated servers, depending on the scale.
by xmcqdpt2 | 2026-02-05 12:45:42+00:00
I tried copilot agent once, and it just claimed that it accessed a website that should have been blocked by corporate firewalls and uploaded a bunch of proprietary data. Lots of very specific information about how it clicked on specific buttons of the website etc.

We raised a high priority ticket with MS and turns out that Copilot Agent lied about the entire thing because the website was blocked. It completely made it up.

The fact that we are supposed to use Copilot Agent for open-ended "research" is mind-boggling.
by conartist6 | 2026-02-05 12:46:09+00:00
THE CODE IS THAT LAYER.

If your code does a shit job of capturing the requirements, no amount of markdown will improve your predicament until the code itself is concise enough to be a spec.

Of course you're free to ignore this advice. Lots of the world's code is spaghetti code. You're free to go that direction and reap the reward. Just don't expect to reach any further than mediocrity before your house of cards comes tumbling down, because it turns out "you don't need strong foundations to build tall things anymore" is just abjectly untrue