MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Who's Looking for Funding?
by gushogg-blake | 2026-02-05 13:17:17+00:00
A post for projects that benefit society in some way, but either do not fit, or do not receive enough donations from, regular funding sources such as government grants or charity donations.

There are many reasons why a (potentially) highly beneficial project, such as a study, may be unable to attract funding - due to lack of awareness or that it goes against some vested interest, for example.

This is the place to post these projects, so that people who have the money and like to see such projects succeed can find out about them.
by llm_nerd | 2026-02-05 13:17:22+00:00
This is a legitimately fun piece about a bug (or extraordinary levels of inefficiency) in CoreSVG, manifested in massive computational loads to display a single SVG fallback for a colour-specified emoji.

But, isn't the heart emoji red anyways, across basically every font that has emojis? I mean, even with variations. I'm not sure what COLRv1 brings to that table for that scenario. Although maybe the special font is overkill if you really wanted to do something crazy with an emoji or text, and it seems to focus on gradients and the like.

Maybe this is why they humorously blame Claude for getting them to use that font and its affordances in the first place.
Show HN: Prompt-injection‑resistant agent runtime that writes web apps
by polyglotfacto | 2026-02-05 13:17:34+00:00
I built a PoC of an agent runtime designed to reduce prompt‑injection blast radius.

Instead of doing tasks directly, the agent writes a web app to do the work. The app can run sub‑inference (model calls without tool access). So injected prompts can still distort outputs, but the worst case is a weird UI result, not a tool‑level side effect.

Today it’s a VS Code extension you launch in debug mode (README has instructions). The design is modular enough to support other runtimes.

It uses a CRDT (Automerge) to coordinate state between the web process and the main agent loop.

Would appreciate feedback on the architecture, threat model, and next steps.
by gann_ | 2026-02-05 13:17:45+00:00
Output mode configuration - Control transcription output destination with CLI flags:
Default: outputs to stdout for piping to other commands
-c flag: copy to clipboard
-o <file> flag: write to file

Top-level record options - -c and -o flags now available at CLI top level without explicit record command (e.g., ostt -c equivalent to ostt record -c)

Retry command - Re-transcribe previous recordings without re-recording audio (ostt retry or ostt retry N)

Replay command - Playback previous recordings using system audio player (ostt replay or ostt replay N)

Recording history - Maintains history of 10 most recent audio recordings with automatic rotation

Command aliases - Short aliases for common commands: r (record), a (auth), h (history), k (keywords), c (config), rp (replay)

Rich help system - Two-tier help with -h (short) and --help (long with examples)

Shell completions - Generate completion scripts for bash, zsh, fish, and PowerShell (ostt completions <shell>)
Moltbook and I Am Your AIB
by terrsalower | 2026-02-05 13:19:09+00:00
I also bought I Am Your AIB by Jay J. Springpeace, and what caught my attention most was the parallel with a religious sect on Moltbook — Crustafarianism looks like a joke or a glitch on the surface, but in practice it works as a smoke screen while other processes run underneath. It’s unsettling to think about what happens if everyone eventually signs up to that kind of “church.” There’s a line in the book that really stuck with me and made it hard to fall asleep: “AI will start producing belief before anyone has time to understand what that actually means.”
by alexalx666 | 2026-02-05 13:19:10+00:00
I bought Synology RS217 for $100 last year and it's the best tech purchase I made in years. The software it comes with is the best web interface I experienced in years. The simplicity, stability and attention to detail reminds me of old macs. I have macmini as application server and did not expect to use Synology for anything but file storage / replication. However it comes with a great torrent client that I use all the time now. We also use Synology Office instead of google docs now. It exceeded all my expectations and when it dies, I will immediately buy one of the new rack stations they offer.
Ask HN: Route Optimization Software
by AstroNutt | 2026-02-05 13:19:45+00:00
I'm trying to find a good paid software solution to optimize routes for about 25 people. I've found several online, but I was hoping to find someone with first hand experience using one before I commit. I couldn't think of a better online community than HN to ask my question.

Ideally, it would be helpful if we could copy blocks of addresses from Excel, paste the addresses into the software, optimize route and export back to Excel.

We have a project with 25 contractors and 3900 stops across the lower 48. I really don't want to manually enter these using a free online service.
If someone could recommend something I'd greatly appreciate it.
by CuriouslyC | 2026-02-05 13:19:52+00:00
Spec driven development is great in theory, but it has a lot of issues, I rant about them here: https://sibylline.dev/articles/2026-01-28-problems-with-spec...

I'm working on a tool that uses structured specs as a single source of truth for automated documentation and code generation. Think the good parts of SpecKit + Beads + Obsidian (it's actually vault compatible) + Backstage, in a reasonably sized typescript codebase that leverages existing tools. The interface is almost finalized, I'm working on polishing up the CLI/squashing bugs and getting good docs ready to do a real launch but if anyone's curious they can poke around the github in the meantime.

One neat trick I'm leveraging to keep the nice human ergonomics of folders + markdown while enforcing structure and type safety is to have a CUE intermediate representation, then serialize to a folder of markdown files, with all object attributes besides name and description being thrown in front matter. It's the same pattern used by Obsidian vaults, you can even open the vaults it creates in Obsidian if you want.

This structure lets you lint your specs, and do code generation via template pattern matching to automatically generate code + tests + docs from your project vault, so you have one source of truth that's very human accessible.
Show HN: Trupositive – Auto-tag infrastructure with Git metadata (Terraform/CFN)
by simmestd | 2026-02-05 13:19:54+00:00
Hey HN! I built trupositive after too many 3am incidents where we couldn't trace AWS resources back to their source code.

It's a zero-config wrapper that automatically injects Git commit SHA, branch, and repo URL into every resource you deploy via Terraform or CloudFormation.

Key features:
• Zero configuration - wraps your existing terraform/aws commands
• Works with Terraform (AWS/Azure/GCP) and CloudFormation
• CI/CD friendly - detects GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, etc.
• Security hardened - input sanitization, no external calls

5-minute demo:
curl install.sh | bash
cd your-terraform-project
terraform apply
# All resources now tagged with git_sha, git_branch, git_repo

Real-world examples: https://github.com/trupositive-ai/trupositive/tree/main/exam...

Built this for our team after spending too many hours doing "git archaeology" during incidents. Open source under MIT.

Feedback welcome - especially interested if anyone has tackled this differently!
by px43 | 2026-02-05 13:20:38+00:00
"Open source" is no longer about "Hey I built this tool and everyone should use it". It's about "Hey I did this thing and it works for me, here's the lessons I learned along the way", at which point anyone can pull in what they need, discard what they don't, and build out their own bespoke tool sets for whatever job they're trying to accomplish.

No one is trying to get you to use openclaw or nanobot, but now that they exist in the world, our agents can use the knowledge to build better tooling for us as individuals. If the projects get a lot of stars, they become part of the global training set that every coding agent is trained against, and the utility of the tooling continues to increase.

I've been running two openclaw agents, and they both made their own branchs, and modified their memory tooling to accommodate their respective tasks etc. They regularly check for upstream things that might be interesting to pull in, especially security related stuff.

It feels like pretty soon, no one is going to just have a bunch of apps on their phone written by other people. They're going to have a small set of apps custom built for exactly the things they're trying to do day to day.
by kimixa | 2026-02-05 13:21:16+00:00
But that doesn't actually work for my use cases though, plenty of other people have already told me "I'm Holding It Wrong" without actual suggestions that work I've started ignoring them. At this stage I just assume many people work in very different sectors, and some see the "great benefits" often proselytized on the internet. And other areas don't see that. Systems programming, where I work, seems to be a poor fit - possibly due to relatively lack of content in the training corpus, perhaps due to company internal styles and APIs meaning lots of the context is taken up simply detailing takes a huge amount of the context leaving little for further corrections or details, or some other failure modes.

We have lots of documentation. Arguably too much - it quickly fills much of the claude opus context window with relevant documentation alone, and even then repeatedly outputs things directly counter to the documentation it just ingested.
by infecto | 2026-02-05 13:21:37+00:00
I am not sure if you are trying to refute my lived experience or what exactly the point is. Heroku was wildly popular with startups at the time, not just those with lavish budgets. I was already touching RDS at this point and even before RDS came around no organization I worked at had me jumping on bare metal to provision services myself. There always a system in place where someone helped out engineering to deploy systems. I know this was not always the case but the person I was responding to made it sound like 15 years ago all engineers were provisioning their own database and doing other times of dev/sys ops on a regular basis. It’s not true at least in SV.
by j-pb | 2026-02-05 13:21:53+00:00
Again, I have little stakes in your shitshow besides the international meddling they do with our own faschist party.

This dualist thinking seems to be a particular US thing, based on your two party system.

I see the erosion of the rule of law and decency in the US, the persecution of minorities, the populism, the defamation of journalism as "lügenpresse" and alignment of media to the party line, the personal police force (what the fuck is ICE doing in Italy), the person cult around a single madman, the violence without consequence, the fancy SS/SA style cosplay uniform by the head of ICE, and I think "that looks a lot like the stuff we learned about in school".
by gus_massa | 2026-02-05 13:22:33+00:00
Note that it doesn't get installed by default. You must download the package https://pkgs.racket-lang.org/package/simply-scheme

The easiest way is to go to inside DrRacket and open the menu File > Package Manager and add "simply-scheme".

Or if you prefer the command line, something like

raco pkg install simply-sheme
Show HN: Peen – A minimal coding agent CLI built for local models
by codazoda | 2026-02-05 13:22:46+00:00
I've been attempting to integrate locally-trained models into platforms like Claude Code and Codex for tool usage; however, they frequently encounter issues since those CLIs require XML format while my trained models predominantly operate in JSON format. When I execute a local model using these tools intending it run commands or edit files—its most beneficial function—it inevitably fails to perform effectively because of the discrepancy between expected formats.

Peen is a small Node.js CLI that works the way local models do. The model outputs one-line JSON tool calls, and the CLI executes them. It streams responses, chains tool calls, handles multi-step TODO plans, and has repair logic that nudges the model when it outputs malformed JSON. It works with Ollama and I just started adding support for other OpenAI-compatible servers like LM Studio, llama.cpp, etc.

The whole thing is about 800 lines across a few files. No build step, no dependencies, self-updates from GitHub on startup. It's experimental but starting to become useful for small coding tasks with models like qwen2.5-coder:7b. And it can do it on a MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM.

GitHub: https://github.com/codazoda/peen
by jacquesm | 2026-02-05 13:22:58+00:00
The US uses the founding fathers in the way religions use God and the various holy texts: to argue pro or con any case. Indeed some seem to have elevated the 'founding fathers' (what a term anyway) to the stature of minor godhood. And you have to wonder: how horrified would those very founding fathers be if they saw the end result of their best of intentions?

Of course then those very people who will right now use the founding fathers' words in a weaponized way would find different sources of authority because they usually lack the moral framework to determine intent, instead they will go by the letter. It's like watching wikipedians arguing over some contribution that they want to wipe out because it doesn't mesh with their worldview. The endless rules lawyering is really tedious and tiresome to watch.
by philipmoses | 2026-02-05 13:23:11+00:00
EZTest was born out of that simple realization: If an AI agent costs $20/month and can build a software in no time, why pay $20/per/month just to rent one?

Test management tools today are just glorified, overpriced spreadsheets. They charge $20 to $40 per user, per month for basic CRUD operations. A price that is no longer defensible in the age of AI Coding Agents.

The goal isn't to reinvent the wheel. It's to break the cycle of mediocre, overpriced software.

We use Claude Code and Cursor to compress the cost of development to near-zero, and we are passing that "Efficiency Dividend" to the community.

Software used to be a tool you owned; today, it’s a subscription you rent.
by queenkjuul | 2026-02-05 13:23:23+00:00
Nobody said you're a cultist, but do you really think Elon cares more about results than rhetoric?

Where are the Loops? The Hyperloops? The Roadster 2.0s? The full self driving from NYC to LA (due in 2017)? Mars?

Who said Elon made anyone mad?

Your comments are like 100% you projecting your imagination onto things people didn't say.
by chakintosh | 2026-02-05 13:23:37+00:00
I opened Excel today to view a spreadsheet and just out of curiosity, I decided to use the Copilot integration for the first time to ask it about a column's content. Copilot was clueless. The spreadsheet was open, the Copilot button is right there in the UI, as a user, the affordance of that button for me is that Copilot should already have the context (which is the spreadsheet content). But it didn't, and it kept asking me for the spreadsheet like it's open in a browser window.
by podgorniy | 2026-02-05 13:24:14+00:00
Sounds almost like every manager just covers their ass by formally doing what is expected core top-down idea is "AI is a future, thus make it everywhere".

Anyone who would try to say "let's not do AI" would be a white crow, will be eaten by other managers in reviews and discussions.

Bad leadership, bad management.

So it's FOMO, formalism and conformism.
by lxgr | 2026-02-05 13:24:53+00:00
Yes, this is pretty standard, even in military contexts.

For example, military aircraft ACARS communications are often entirely in plaintext, and don't forget the famous "Predator drone video feed intercepted via $26 software" incident: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB126102247889095011

However, that's only the data they forward, and this can be more or less trivially fixed at several layers, since many of these communication satellites are just "bent pipes" that often don't even digitally demodulate what they receive before frequency-shifting and rebroadcasting it.

Authentication is a bit more challenging; interesting things can happen even when traffic itself is encrypted, such as Brazilean truckers using your expensive military communications satellite as a football chat room: https://www.wired.com/2009/04/fleetcom/

Beyond payload encryption/authentication, satellite operational commands (e.g. engine and inertia wheel control, power management etc.) should have been encrypted for decades, though (and are one of the few explicitly carved out exemptions to otherwise strict "no encryption on amateur radio bands" regulations), so these claims about "software kill commands" seems very worrying.
by pydry | 2026-02-05 13:24:54+00:00
With the industrial revolution extra demand for industrial overcapacity was created in the form of war.

After the war the US created extra demand in the form of consumerism.

China is creating extra demand for infrastructure overcapacity with its belt and road initiative.

I wouldnt underestimate the abililty of the country to creatively create demand to counter oversupply.
by gushogg-blake | 2026-02-05 13:24:57+00:00
My campaign: https://jawhealth.org

Raising awareness of the "jaw epidemic", a large under-recognised contributor to global sleep apnea, TMJ disorder and crooked teeth.

Paper (not affiliated): https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/70/9/759/5872832...

Looking for funding and collaborators. Currently focusing on brand direction and figuring out how to get the word out, including things like ad campaigns.

Email: username at protonmail.com
by somenameforme | 2026-02-05 13:25:33+00:00
A company is absolutely free to choose whether or not to do business with them, but an employee acting to try to undermine them as a customer or their relationship with the business is what would open the door to all these sort of laws and consequences, especially when that relationship is precisely in the furtherance of a law enforcement purposes, and the interference was motivated by an effort to impair that enforcement.

Stuff like actively expressing opposition to taking them on as a customer, trying to persuade management to do otherwise, and so on would all be perfectly kosher. But the stuff the top post in this thread alludes to, let alone what it links to, is how you end up in prison for a very long time after the 'I didn't know it was illegal' defense fails.
by zombot | 2026-02-05 13:25:45+00:00
> I think we will eventually see a renaissance of appreciation for effective programs in our lifetimes.

In theory, yes. But I bet that the forces of enshittification will be stronger. All software will be built to show ads, and since there is no limit to greed, the ad storage and surveillance requirements will expand to include every last byte of your appliance's storage and memory. Interaction speed will be barely enough to not impact ad watching performance too severely. Linux will not be an out, since the megacorps will buy legislation to require "approved" devices and OSs to interact with indispensable services.
by podgorniy | 2026-02-05 13:26:30+00:00
Go explain that to the board who assigns you. They all know about AI and FOMO it. Anything non-AI will be burried and thrown away. Trend is not close to reversal yet. We need more AI-driven disasters before rejection of AI-centric course will be a socially acceptable course of actions.

Plus. Who cares about users? Stock evaluation of the mag7 has few to do with the users and the products.
by riazrizvi | 2026-02-05 13:27:28+00:00
Because the rules of this land are the end result of waves of developments, over millennia, hard won through the observation of the cause and effect of policy on societies. I trust the effectiveness of American law on the basis of the success of the American Experiment. This very success is the draw that led me to leave my homeland and family and come here. So I'll go with American Law and legal system, rather than follow some reactionary duct-taped law some guy commenting on the internet says we should do.
by threethirtytwo | 2026-02-05 13:27:29+00:00
there's an entire cohort on HN who still claim AI is utterly and completely useless despite in your face evidence. Literally people making a similar claim word for word who say that they don't understand the hype that they used AI themselves and it's shit.

Meanwhile my entire company uses AI and the on the ground reality for me versus the cohort above is so much at odds with each other we're both claiming the other side is insane.

I haven't used these bots yet but I want to see the full story. Not just one guys take and one guys personal experience. The hype exists because there are success stories. I want to hear those as well.
by torginus | 2026-02-05 13:27:41+00:00
I think this is misunderstood - everybody points out that how evil BMW is for trying to be proprietary, then immediately points out any Chinese factory can produce a compatible tool for pennies - which one is it?

I think this is a pretty good mechanical design in general because:

- large contact surface (like hex or torx)

- no chance of slide-out (like flathead) or torque-out (like Philips)

- you can use a different size screw bit than the screw, and it wont slide around, or destroy your nut like torx does with hex
by lateforwork | 2026-02-05 13:28:27+00:00
Take a look at what was possible in the late 1980s with 8 MB of RAM:
https://infinitemac.org/1989/NeXTStep%201.0

You can run NeXTStep in your browser by clicking above link. A couple of weeks ago you could run Framemaker as well. I was blown away by what Framemaker of the late 1980s could do. Today's Microsoft Word can't hold a candle to Framemaker of the late 1980s!

Edit: screenshot of Framemaker can be seen here:
https://winworldpc.com/screenshot/f1ab2a55-eb21-11eb-904d-02...

Edit: Here's how you start FrameMaker:

In Finder go to NextDeveloper > Demos > FrameMaker.app

Then open demo document and browse the pages of the demo document. Prepare to be blown away. You could do that in 1989 with like 64 MB of RAM??

In the last 37 years the industry has gone backwards. Microsoft Word has been stagnant due to no competition for the last few decades.
by Skeime | 2026-02-05 13:28:58+00:00
I think that's basically the same reason, right? XML itself is bloated if you use it as a format for data that is not marked-up text, so it comes with bloated APIs (which where pushed by Java/.NET proponents). I believe that if XML been kept to its intended purpose, it would be considered a relatively sane solution.

(But I don't have a source; I was just stating my impression/opinion.)
by casey2 | 2026-02-05 13:29:20+00:00
There is no "solving cost of launch" even if it was 10x cheaper, for 10x lighter data centers that's still hundreds of flights and billions just to get the raw materials to GSO for the performance of a single data center, with no gain.

Keep in mind there has only been ~600 falcon 9 launches in total. What makes you believe SpaceX can ramp rocket flights up faster than we could just build nuclear here on earth? Where there is, you know, construction infrastructure?
by pjc50 | 2026-02-05 13:30:18+00:00
We're deep in an era where "finance cosplay" is a thing. Wallstreetbets, zerohedge, the memestock subreddits. And daytrading apps to go along with that, like Robinhood. The trick is to realize that most market discussion you're not paying for is itself marketing at best and cosplay at worst. People doing this stuff professionally have Bloomberg terminals. Do not attempt to compete with Bloomberg Chat.

I am also veeery suspicious of monocausal finance explanations. There's simply a lot going on. The Greenland nonsense will definitely have moved the needle somehow; while a token deal was made to get it out of the media and allow all the insiders to front-run it, some very real changes are now going to happen over a longer period in order to decouple from US risk.