MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by joe_mamba | 2026-02-19 11:42:25+00:00
>The entertainment CEOs in charge would happily enshittify to stream AI slop with no workers if they thought they could get away with it

You're missing the point of my argument again and moving the frame of the discussions to random tangents you make up, but don't disprove what I'm saying.

Let me disprove your point AGAIN, this time with numbers. According to my Google-Fu, 2000-3000 people worked on making the Matrix in 1999, while today Disney employs 4000-6000 people for their shitty Marvel movies or remakes like snow white.

So no, the enshitification is not due to execs cutting workers, since more people work today on blockbuster movies than before, while quality is more shit.

The enshitification is because the people they employ now are either incompetent or malicious.
by theandrewbailey | 2026-02-19 11:42:34+00:00
I use Unigine Heaven to benchmark Linux systems. A colleague's friend has an epic spreadsheet of Heaven benchmarks across many configurations, and he submitted a few I've done. I ran it at home on my Linux desktop. For shits and giggles, I also downloaded the Windows version and ran it in Proton, and got a 30% performance boost! I suspect that a lot of that is due to the dxvk library that Proton uses, and the multithreading that it introduces translating D3D11 calls to Vulkan.

https://benchmark.unigine.com/heaven

https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk
by conartist6 | 2026-02-19 11:42:57+00:00
Why do you need high throughput though? Isn't that a metric of how fast a batch processing system is?

Why are we still treating batch processing as the controlling paradigm for tools that work on code. If we fully embraced incremental recomputation and shifted the focus to how to avoid re-doing the same work over and over, batch processing speed would become largely irrelevant as a metric
by wongarsu | 2026-02-19 11:43:01+00:00
There are a lot of rocks beneath earth's surface, and it shouldn't be surprising or magical that some of them are heavier than others. Which does affect local gravity, especially if we talk about the rocks close enough to the surface.

Take for example a look at https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2015/04/Bouguer_gr... which has better resolution than the map in the article and tries to correct for oceans and mountains. There are clear deviations from the norm, and they are not shaped in a way that can be explained by simple rotational effects (even though those also exist)
by rglullis | 2026-02-19 11:43:33+00:00
> But the entire reason it's subsidized is that Anthropic can use the data to improve their product.

This is grade A, absolute crap. It's subsidized because everyone else is subsidizing it, and everyone is doing it because they are trying to lock their consumer share.

The solution is quite simple. Just get the FTC to forbid tie-in sales so that we don't get the huge corporations using their infinite resources to outlive the competition. Anthropic/Amazon/Google/OpenAI/Facebook can offer any type of service they want, but if the access to the API costs $X when offered standalone, then that is the baseline price for anything that depends on the API to work.
by amabito | 2026-02-19 11:44:23+00:00
Right — search engines have long had authority scoring, link graphs, freshness signals, etc.

The interesting gap is that retrieval systems used in LLM pipelines often don't inherit those signals in a structured way. They fetch documents, but the model sees text, not provenance metadata or confidence scores.

So even if the ranking system “knows” a source is weak, that signal doesn’t necessarily survive into generation.

Maybe the harder problem isn’t retrieval, but how to propagate source trust signals all the way into the claim itself.
by brainwad | 2026-02-19 11:44:55+00:00
People say the universe is "infinite" because spacetime's curvature is, as far as we can tell, flat, and so it should continue in all directions without ever wrapping back on itself (unlike, say, the Earth, which has spherical curvature).

But practically it's finite because we are only in causal contact with things up to 13.7b ly from us, and given space appears to be expanding at an accelerating rate, we probably will never get into causal contact with (almost all of) the part of the infinite universe outside of our light cone, even though things ought to exist over the "horizon". So only a tiny infinitesimal sliver of the infinite universe is knowable by us.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-02-19 11:45:07+00:00
This is Zuckerberg's testimony

The question called for a "yes" or "no" answer

CNBC has used several headlines for this URL

The original CNBC headline was "Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg set to testify in LA social media safety trial"

https://web.archive.org/web/20260218143524/https://www.cnbc....

Then the headline changed to "Zuckerberg testimony: Company consulted stakeholders about keeping beauty filters"

https://web.archive.org/web/20260218213815/https://www.cnbc....

The current headline is "Mark Zuckerberg said he reached out to Apple CEO Tim Cook to discuss 'well being of teens and kids'"

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/18/meta-mark-zuckerberg-social-...
by merlindru | 2026-02-19 11:46:01+00:00
no real gotchas. JS is slightly dangerous because of JS, yes. You should never fetch things at runtime to execute if possible - instead, you install absolutely everything you need with npm or bun, and it gets inlined at build time

electrobun ships with an RPC (i think it also does some encryption?) so as long as you use that to communicate between your webview and bun "host process" you should be safe.
by ceteia | 2026-02-19 11:47:28+00:00
Wasn't the F-35 budget "explosion", or overruns, caused in general by mismanagement? But I will not argue that C++ is perfect. Instead, the ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_flight_V88 , where US$370 million was lost, with code written in Ada, is an example where Ada was presented as a safer language and even mandated in the military industry, but where it turned out less well in practice. Even proclaimed "safer" languages can have catastrophic failures, and one can suspect that they might even be less safe in practice, especially if they need mandates to be picked. Instead of Ada companies or other organizations lobbying to force industry to use their language, maybe it is better if there is free competition, and then the onus is on the software development companies to deliver high quality. Ada has improved since the 1990s, perhaps because it has been forced to compete fairly with C, C++ and other languages. Following that thinking, increased, not decreased, competition should be encouraged.

Your lucky soul analogy argument doesn't make any sense.
Show HN: Agent Smith – open-source agent that turns issues into pull requests
by hleichsenring | 2026-02-19 11:47:58+00:00
Hey HN, I built Agent Smith — a self-hosted AI coding agent that takes a ticket reference, clones your repo, analyzes the code, writes an implementation plan, executes it, and opens a PR.
It supports GitHub, Azure DevOps, Jira, and GitLab. You bring your own API key — Claude, OpenAI, or Gemini. No SaaS, no account, runs on your machine or your cluster.
I built it in a few days using the same approach the agent itself uses: structured architecture prompts, strict coding principles, and an AI assistant doing the implementation. The coding principles that govern Agent Smith's output are the same ones I used to build it.
It's early — works well for well-scoped tickets, not yet reliable for large multi-file refactorings. Interactive chat interfaces (Slack, Teams) are in progress.
Would love feedback. The prompts and all 17 architecture phases are in the repo if you want to see how the context is structured.
by throwaway2037 | 2026-02-19 11:47:59+00:00
The first paragraph is fine -- I agree. The second paragraph is a silly hyperbole that comes up over and over again on HN and needs to die. Major newspapers are written for about 8th grade level reading comprehension. Cooking instructions on a prep'd meal are probably much lower -- maybe 5th grade. The "average person" (whatever that term means) living in highly developed nations can read at 8th grade level or above.
Show HN: Agorio – TypeScript SDK for Building AI Shopping Agents (UCP/ACP)
by nolpak14 | 2026-02-19 11:48:07+00:00
I built an open-source TypeScript SDK for building AI agents that can discover merchants, browse products, and complete purchases using the new UCP (Google/Shopify) and ACP (OpenAI/Stripe) commerce protocols.

Try it in 2 minutes:

npm install @agorio/sdk

import { ShoppingAgent, GeminiAdapter, MockMerchant } from '@agorio/sdk';
const merchant = new MockMerchant();
await merchant.start();
const agent = new ShoppingAgent({
llm: new GeminiAdapter({ apiKey: process.env.GEMINI_API_KEY })
});
const result = await agent.run(
`Go to ${merchant.domain} and buy me wireless headphones`
);

What it does:

- UcpClient: discovers merchants via /.well-known/ucp, parses capabilities, normalizes both array and object formats, calls REST APIs
- ShoppingAgent: plan-act-observe loop with 12 built-in tools (discover, search, browse, cart, checkout, order tracking)
- MockMerchant: full UCP-compliant Express server with product catalog, checkout flow, and configurable chaos testing (latency, error rates)
- LlmAdapter interface: swap LLMs without changing agent code. Gemini ships today, Claude and OpenAI coming in v0.2

The agent handles the entire purchase flow autonomously - UCP discovery, product search, cart management, shipping, payment, order confirmation. 37 tests passing.

Context: UCP was announced Jan 11 by Google, Shopify, and 25+ partners (Walmart, Target, Visa, Mastercard). ACP is by OpenAI and Stripe, powers ChatGPT Instant Checkout. Both are open standards. But there was no developer SDK for building on top of them - just the raw specs.

GitHub: https://github.com/Nolpak14/agorio
npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@agorio/sdk
by dspillett | 2026-02-19 11:48:16+00:00
Depending on utilisation and good use of low-power or sleep (or full off) states when things aren't actively processing, it can still be a _lot_ cheaper to run things at home than on a rented service. Power costs have increased a lot in recent years, but so have compute-per-watt ratios and you are not paying the that indirect compute price when the processors are asleep or off whereas with subscription access to LLMs you are paying at least the base subscription each month even if you don't use it at all in that period. Much the same as the choice between self-hosting an open-source project or paying for a hosted instance - and in both cases people don't tend to consider the admin cost (for some of us the admin is “play time”!) so the self-hosted option it does practically feel free.
by michaelt | 2026-02-19 11:48:22+00:00
When is that?

With the poles at the 1 minute mark, the robots enter holding them and their left hand never moves on the pole. Also note the stationary hand is matte grey while the moving hand is metallic silver.

Likewise with the wine gourds (?) at 2m30s and the nunchucks at 3m40s.

It’s a completely sensible design decision, much simpler to do cartwheels and vaults if you don’t have super delicate fingers fitted.
by hleichsenring | 2026-02-19 11:48:28+00:00
Hey HN,
I built Agent Smith — a self-hosted AI coding agent that takes a ticket reference, clones your repo, analyzes the code, writes an implementation plan, executes it, and opens a PR.

It supports GitHub, Azure DevOps, Jira, and GitLab. You bring your own API key — Claude, OpenAI, or Gemini. No SaaS, no account, runs on your machine or your cluster.

I built it in a few days using the same approach the agent itself uses: structured architecture prompts, strict coding principles, and an AI assistant doing the implementation. The coding principles that govern Agent Smith's output are the same ones I used to build it.

It's early — works well for well-scoped tickets, not yet reliable for large multi-file refactorings. Interactive chat interfaces (Slack, Teams) are in progress.

Would love feedback. The prompts and all 17 architecture phases are in the repo if you want to see how the context is structured.
by nonameiguess | 2026-02-19 11:48:41+00:00
I get that it's a shitpost, but if you want to take this at all seriously, a Linux container is just a Linux process in its own namespaces separate from the namespaces of its parent or at least separate from PID 1. If you're not actually doing anything requiring OCI bases and layering, as in, like any other sane program, all your functions have the same dependencies, spawn everything in the same mount namespaces at least and just use the host. Then you don't need to mount the docker socket recursively, you don't need docker or a socket at all. This isn't really as crazy as developers think it is because they think containers in Linux are just docker. You can make system calls from within the Lisp runtime itself, including unshare, and bam, you've got a container per function call without needing to shell out and accept all the overhead of a separate container runtime.

Also why are the image builds hard-coded for amd64? Are you really doing anything here that can't be done on arm?
by mrighele | 2026-02-19 11:48:59+00:00
Just tried their hello world

* npx electrobun init

* [choose hello-world]

* bun install

* bun run build

This generates in linux a folder that takes about 60M [1] (mostly the "bun" executable)

[1] du says 60M, ls says 100M, maybe it is a sparse file ?
by nolpak14 | 2026-02-19 11:49:06+00:00
Hey HN, I'm the author.

Some background: I've been working on tooling for UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol) for a few months. UCP is the open standard Google and Shopify announced in January - it lets AI agents discover stores via /.well-known/ucp and complete purchases through standardized APIs.

I built Agorio because when I tried to build a shopping agent against the UCP spec, I had to:

1. Write my own profile parser that handles both capability formats in the spec
2. Build a checkout state machine (incomplete → requires_escalation → ready_for_complete → completed)
3. Create a mock merchant from scratch just to test against
4. Wire up LLM function calling with JSON Schema tool definitions

None of this was commerce-specific - it was all protocol plumbing. So I extracted it into a reusable SDK.

The key abstractions:

- LlmAdapter - two methods: chat(messages, tools) and modelName. Any LLM with function calling works. The Gemini adapter is ~100 lines.
- ShoppingAgent - takes an LlmAdapter, runs plan-act-observe with 12 tools. Manages cart state, checkout sessions, order history.
- UcpClient - fetches /.well-known/ucp, normalizes capabilities, resolves REST/MCP/A2A transports.
- MockMerchant - full Express server with UCP profile, OpenAPI schema, 10 products, checkout flow, order tracking. Supports chaos testing with configurable latency and error rates.

Technical choices I'd like feedback on:

- Is a plan-act-observe loop the right pattern, or should I support ReAct / tree-of-thought?
- Currently UCP-only. ACP client is planned for v0.2. Should I prioritize that?
- The LlmAdapter interface is deliberately minimal. Too minimal?

Would love feedback from anyone building with LLM function calling or commerce APIs. Happy to talk UCP/ACP protocol details.
by kkfx | 2026-02-19 11:49:26+00:00
EU tech alternative is FLOSS, not copy the model someone else did earlier and better. As an EU Citizen I reject the initiatives of the Commission, which moreover, is not elected but appointed through a mechanism where the will of the people never plays a part, whose goals are the sinicization of the EU and its destruction for partisan interests against ours.

To have a sovereign IT sector, we must ENFORCE FLOSS and open hardware in no uncertain terms, rather than copying Big Tech.
by Underqualified | 2026-02-19 11:49:46+00:00
I work in a big corporation in Europe. Officially we're only allowed to use CoPilot, but a lot of people just have their own subscriptions. Management either turns a blind eye or is actively encouraging investigating other AI solutions.
Of course, people need to take care of confidentiality, data protection and all that, but a lot of work is just not affected by those concerns.
by codethief | 2026-02-19 11:49:51+00:00
People here are laughing of course but I do think there is a deeper truth behind this:

> A Docker image is a piece of executable code that produces some output given some input.

The ideas behind containerization and sandboxing are rather closely related to functional programming and controlling side effects. If binaries always only read stdin and wrote to stdout, we wouldn't need sandboxes – they would be pure functions.

In the real world, though, binaries usually have side effects and I really wish we could control those in a more fine-grained manner. Ideally, binaries couldn't just do anything by default but actually had to declare all their side effects (i.e. accessing env variables, config, state, cache, logs, DBUS/Xserver/Wayland sockets, user data, shared libraries, system state, …), so that I could easily put them in a sandbox that's tailored to them.

Conversely, I'm waiting for the day when algebraic effects are so common in programming languages that I can safely execute an untrusted JavaScript function because I have tight control over what side effects it can trigger.
by zac23or | 2026-02-19 11:50:39+00:00
> Unigui has been around for over a decade

Is it possible to take a VCL project, change some configuration, and turn it into a web server? Unigui is similar to Intraweb, isn't it? You need to recreate the project as a Unigui/Intraweb project.

> No, fpc builds, optimizes, and runs exactly like Delphi

It's not my experience. As an example: https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php/topic,4958

> for years, this part feels like it was made up on the spot!If you have a crash, it is usually you doing something wrong with your controls.

No, I remember the event exactly. I saw a post about the community edition here, filled out the Embarcadero form, and downloaded it. No anything added to Delphi. And I had a bad experience with it.

I love Delphi. The best days of my life as a developer were spent using Delphi. But this does not solve the problems that Delphi and Embarcadero face.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-19 11:52:33+00:00
What is easy to do is to emulate FP128 with FP64 (double-double) or even FP256 with FP64.

The reason is that the exponent range of FP64 is typically sufficient to avoid overflows and underflows in most applications.

On the other hand, the exponent range of FP32 is insufficient for most scientific-technical computing.

For an adequate exponent range, you must use either three FP32 per FP64, or two FP32 and an integer. In this case the emulation becomes significantly slower than the simplistic double-single emulation.

With the simpler double-single emulation, you cannot expect to just plug it in most engineering applications, e.g. SPICE for electronic circuit simulation, and see that the application works. Some applications could be painstakingly modified to work with such an implementation, but that is not normally an option.

So to be interchangeable with the use of standard FP64 you really must also emulate the exponent range, at the price of much slower emulation.

I did this at some point in the past, but today it makes no sense in comparison with the available alternatives.

Today, the best FP64 performance per dollar by far, is achieved with Ryzen 9950X or Ryzen 9900X, in combination with Inter Battlemage B580 GPUs.

When money does not matter, you can use AMD Epyc in combination with AMD "datacenter" GPUs, which would achieve much better performance per watt, but the performance per dollar would be abysmally low.
by akpa1 | 2026-02-19 11:52:34+00:00
There is the fundamental thing of skeletal structure and build though - people naturally are entirely different shapes, regardless of fat or excess weight, wich is what the comment is mostly referring to in my eyes.

I'm built very tall and very spindly, so there are certain body shapes that I will never have (or want, but that's a different question) purely from the point of view that my body just isn't the right base shape to produce them.
by SUDEEPSD25 | 2026-02-19 11:54:00+00:00
There is a phase in every startup when building feels safe.
Decisions are internal. Mistakes are inexpensive.

If something breaks, you fix it quietly and move on. Then one day, that changes.
There’s the public version, which occurs when everyone is watching, and you’re now under the scrutiny of eyes and questions, as if you’re being surrounded by paparazzi.

It might be the first large customer. The first enterprise contract. The first serious invoice. Suddenly your system is no longer just code.

It is revenue, commitments, and trust.

From that moment on, building stops being private. Every architectural decision has external consequences. A billing assumption impacts someone’s financial reporting. An overlooked edge case becomes a customer escalation.

This is EXACTLY where many teams realize that scale is not about handling more traffic. It is about handling more scrutiny.

You cannot rely on speed alone. You cannot patch logic informally.
The system must be predictable, explainable, and resilient under pressure.

You stop asking, “Can we ship this quickly?”
and start asking, “Will this still make sense six months from now?”

That is when engineering becomes leadership. That's where carrying a straight face under pressure is important and that is the moment building stops being experimental and starts being real.
by fatherwavelet | 2026-02-19 11:54:29+00:00
To me it is like steering a car into the ditch and then posting how the car went into a ditch.

You don't have to drive that much to figure out that what is impressive is keeping the car on the road and then traveling further or faster than what you could do by walking. For that though you actually have to have a destination in mind and not just spin the wheels. Post pointless metrics on how fast the wheels spin for your blog no one reads in the vague hope of some hyper Warhol 15 milliseconds of "fame".

The models for me are just making the output of the average person an insufferable bore.
by entropyneur | 2026-02-19 11:54:39+00:00
Previous discussion: https://www.reuters.com/world/us-plans-online-portal-bypass-...

Weird title, but worthy of discussion. From the little info available so far this appears to be little more than political posturing. If you want to fight censorship, an "online portal" to access all the censored content is the wrongest possible way to go about it. But we'll see.
by willis936 | 2026-02-19 11:54:50+00:00
Java garbage collection gets out of control when cramming 100+ poorly optimized mods together. The bedrock edition is great in theory but the proper mod API never appeared. Regardless, people have accomplished some really impressive stuff with commands, but it is an exercise in pain.

The other issue with bedrock is it is far from feature parity with java. If these two things were hit then java could be reasonably retired. However we are decades too late in it being acceptable to introduce a breaking change to mod loading. So it's java forever.
by input_sh | 2026-02-19 11:55:00+00:00
Very, yes, and pretty much anyone that doesn't want to spend their days implementing counter-meaeurements to shut down their scrapers by hiding the content behind a login. I do it all the time, it's fun.

I'm gonna single out Grokipedia as something deterministic enough to be able to easily prove it. I can easily point to sentences there (some about broad-ish topics) that are straight up Markov chain quality versions of sentences I've written. I can make it say anything I want to say or I can waste my time trying to fight their traffic "from Singapore" (Grok is the only "mainstream" LLM that refuses to identify itself via a user agent). Not really a tough choice if you ask me.