MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Alba – Earn and bid on unique software using idle AI credits
by WadeToEarth | 2026-02-27 15:25:40+00:00
I have been using Claude Code lately, and I hated seeing my daily/weekly API quotas go to waste during downtime. So I built ALBA, a system designed to turn that idle power into digital assets.

How it works:
ALBA is an autonomous software factory that runs through Claude Code. You join as a worker node, and the system orchestrates Claude Code to build, test, and deploy functional micro-MVPs like tools, landing pages, and small SaaS.

The Credit and Auction Model:

Contribute: Run a command through Claude Code to power an AI agent task.

Earn: You receive ALBA Credits proportional to the tokens and compute you provided.

Bid: Use those credits in our Auction House to bid on unique software built by the collective.

To make the discovery process more intuitive, I added an "Explore" feature that works like a vertical feed (similar to Shorts). You can quickly cycle through live demos of everything the factory has produced so far. It helps users visualize the "Asset" they are about to bid on.

Exclusive Ownership:
This is the "burn" logic I am most excited about: if you win an auction, you get the source code, and the demo environment is hard-deleted from our servers forever. You own a unique piece of software with zero duplicates.

Tech Stack:
- Frontend: Next.js (Vercel)
- Backend: Java Spring Boot (GCP Cloud Run)
- Database: Supabase/Firestore

Agent Orchestration: via Claude Code CLI

I would love to hear your thoughts on this "Token-to-Asset" arbitrage and the viability of credit-based auctions for exclusive code.
by psychoslave | 2026-02-27 15:25:53+00:00
People uttering the organizational decisions in for profit companies are money driven first. Otherwise they would try to be champion of a different kind of org.

Everyone try to make changes move so it goes well, for some party. If someone want to serve best interest of humanity at whole, they don't sell services to an evil administration, even less to it's war department.

Too bad there is not yet an official ministry of torture and fear, protecting democracy from the dangerous threats of criminal thoughts. We would be given a great lesson of public relations on how virtuous it can be in the long term to provide them efficient services, certainly.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-27 15:26:17+00:00
Genuine question, are you using AI to edit your comments? Going on a rhetorical side quest in a straightforward discussion about policy, law and politics is…well, it’s not on topic.

For what it’s worth, I’m not seeing a failure of communication. I’m seeing a failure of scoping. You’re arguing on the basis of specific legal mechanisms by which power is expressed. I’m arguing the real motivations of and political constraints on decision makers are more fundamental in this case.

That isn’t universally true. Power predicted what Trump would do with tariffs (again, analogy). Legal analysis predicted his constraints (which SCOTUS affirmed). In this case, SecDef has the legal authority to do what’s described. He doesn’t, however, have the political freedom to do so. That turns the latter into the germane constraint, not a litany of proscribed powers.

Put another way, the people—here—are fundamental. (Market reactions, too, though again largely because the people in this administration have chosen the Dow as a lighthouse.) The legal justifications are worse than surface level, they’re ex post facto findings of retaliatory paths. It may feel more substantial to quote DPA statute versus discuss Hegseth and Dario’s motivations and relationships, but that’s, again, missing the forest for the trees.
by _fat_santa | 2026-02-27 15:26:30+00:00
IMO this looks largely like another circular investment. Amazon's investment is tied to OpenAI using AWS for their Frontier product and I assume Nvidia's conditions are that OpenAI continue buying hardware from them. Then there's SoftBank though given that those are the same guys that invested heavily in WeWork, I assume this is just very brash bullishness on their part.

From my perspective, I hope that OpenAI survives and can pull of their IPO but I just have that nagging feeling in my gut that their IPO will be rejected in much the same way that the WeWork IPO was rejected.

On the one hand you can look at these companies investing and take it as a signal that there is something there (in OpenAI) that's worth investing in. On the other hand all these companies that are investing are basically getting that investment back through spending commitments and such and are just using OpenAI as a proxy for what is essentially buying more revenue for themselves.

When their IPO hits later this year I hope that it's the former case and there's actually some good underlying fundamentals to invest in. But based on everything I've read, my gut is telling me they will eventually implode under the weight of their business model and spending commitments.
by tech_tuna | 2026-02-27 15:27:25+00:00
Git is better in some ways, but it is insanely complicated. That matters less now with AI tooling but still there was a time when we all had many choices (commercial and open source) for source control tools. My canonical example is git checkout -b <branch_name> for a new branch, git branch -D <branch_name> to delete the local branch and git push origin :<branch_name>.

I know that that is the old syntax but holy hell, that's insane. Why couldn't it always have been git branch --create|delete|delete-remote? It could have but Linus doesn't care about your feelings or small brain. :)
by general_reveal | 2026-02-27 15:27:30+00:00
Did it ever occur to you that an entire generation of developers are going to retire in less than 20 years? They are betting that the software industry will be autonomous. Really, think of our industry like AUV phenomena. We’re the drivers that are about to be shown the door, that’s the bet.

World will still need software, lots of it. Their valuation is based on an entire developer-less future world (no labor costs).
by LatencyKills | 2026-02-27 15:27:43+00:00
> But talking with an Llm isn’t teddy bear/rubber duck debugging because your llm has some high odds of outputting good feedback.

That isn't how we did it at either Microsoft or Apple. There, we defined it as walking another engineer through a problem. That person may or may not have been an expert in whatever I was working on at the time. You truly aren't suggesting that rubber duck debugging only works when you don't receive feedback?

I use Claude to bounce ideas around just like I did with my human teammates.

I think you're being pedantic, but it doesn't matter to me: in the end, I work must better when I can talk through a problem; Claude is a good stand-in when I don't have access to another human.
by marzchipane | 2026-02-27 15:27:45+00:00
Funnily enough just yesterday I spent an hour or so looking through a copy in a library! I took some photos, you can look through them here:
https://marzchipane.com/reviews/books/codex_seraphinianus.md

The illustrations are gorgeous, and they've been floating around the internet for some time, e.g. the one with the pairs of fish which look like eyes.
by anulum | 2026-02-27 15:27:48+00:00
Hey HN — huge thanks for the thoughtful comments yesterday!

I shipped *v1.2.0* overnight with everything you asked for:

• Full end-to-end benchmark notebook (600+ real RAG/agent traces, HaluEval + TruthfulQA, head-to-head vs Claude self-critique, latency, false positives, recovery rate) → notebooks/04_end_to_end_benchmark.ipynb

• Rich evidence on every halt: top-K conflicting chunks + highlighted NLI premise/hypothesis + distances (now in HaltEvent + dashboard)

• Ready-made graceful fallbacks (soft warning, retrieval-only retry, partial+correction) → examples/graceful_fallbacks.py

• Live Hugging Face Spaces demo (try it yourself): https://huggingface.co/spaces/anulum/director-ai-guardrail

• Full MkDocs site (22 pages), native OpenAI/Anthropic interceptors, score caching, 8-bit NLI, bge-large, LangGraph/Haystack/CrewAI support

Repo: https://github.com/anulum/director-ai
Changelog: https://github.com/anulum/director-ai/releases/tag/v1.2.0

Would love feedback on the new bits — especially the end-to-end numbers and graceful patterns. Fire away!
If you drive clock wise along the beach on an island
by Cookingboy | 2026-02-27 15:28:27+00:00
Is the ocean to your left or to you right?

I asked this question to multiple LLM.

ChatGPT: Wrong but reasoned itself back to being correct.

Gemini: Correct.

Grok: Using expert it got the right answer after 35s.

Claude Sonnet 4.6: Confidently incorrect.

Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/7pmcoWr
by qup | 2026-02-27 15:28:31+00:00
> Remember when they couldn't even build a proper website for Obamacare?

With a massive budget, too. Hundreds of millions iirc.

It felt like a website that the small web-dev shop I worked for could build without much problem in a couple months.

We didn't have 200 layers of beauracracy, though.

That said I don't doubt the military could take their current tech and keep it running. It's far different from the typical grift of government contractors.
by palmotea | 2026-02-27 15:28:51+00:00
> I'm seriously worried there won't be more elections. Not hyperbole at all.

Why? That's a an unrealistic fear, driven by the insanely overwrought political rhetoric of 2026. Think about it: elections will be the absolute last thing to go.

If you want something to worry about, worry about this:

> And the stakes of politics are almost always incredibly high. I think they happen to be higher now. And I do think a lot of what is happening in terms of the structure of the system itself is dangerous. I think that the hour is late in many ways. My view is that a lot of people who embrace alarm don’t embrace what I think obviously follows from that alarm, which is the willingness to make strategic and political decisions you find personally discomfiting, even though they are obviously more likely to help you win.

> Taking political positions that’ll make it more likely to win Senate seats in Kansas and Ohio and Missouri. Trying to open your coalition to people you didn’t want it open to before. Running pro-life Democrats.

> And one of my biggest frustrations with many people whose politics I otherwise share is the unwillingness to match the seriousness of your politics to the seriousness of your alarm. I see a Democratic Party that often just wants to do nothing differently, even though it is failing — failing in the most obvious and consequential ways it can possibly fail. (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/opinion/interesting-times...)
by vonunov | 2026-02-27 15:29:06+00:00
> disingenuous pretending at human experience; alluding vaguely to "that [relatable experience]" and hoping we won't notice that there is clearly no actual knowledge of the qualia it tries to invoke

> subtly detached or glossed-over metaphors

> feels empty

> alluding to things without actually talking about them

> using many words to say nothing

https://v-n-n-v.github.io/chatgpt-voice.html

See also: https://i.vgy.me/ZIxnSh.png
by derbOac | 2026-02-27 15:29:14+00:00
The rationalization aspect of their model can't be overstated enough in my opinion. It never starts with something clearly unethical; it starts with something more complicated. Something that is uncomfortable and morally suboptimal, but has some justification being appealed to — it benefits the group, it's otherwise unfair for some members to have to bear some small temporary cost for the benefits of others, or something of that sort. The level of the corrupt behavior becomes more and more extreme though, such that justification becomes more and more questionable, until you're left with something more seriously problematic. In the meantime, the people who questioned the slippery slope might have left, and you're left with people who aren't in a position of power for whatever reason (they're junior, or in small numbers) to question what has become clearly unethical cultural norms.
by conartist6 | 2026-02-27 15:29:22+00:00
There's one more interesting consequence: you rid yourself of the feedback problem.

To see the problem let's create a stream with feedback. Lets say we have an assembly line that produces muffins from ingredients, and the recipe says that every third muffin we produce must be mushed up and used as an ingredient for further muffins. This works OK until someone adds a final stage to the assembly line, which puts muffins in boxes of 12. Now the line gets completely stuck! It can't get a muffin to use on the start of the line because it hasn't made a full box of muffins yet, and it can't make a full box of muffins because it's starved for ingredients after 3.

If we're mandated to clump the items together we're implicitly assuming that there's no feedback, yet there's also no reason that feedback shouldn't be a first-class ability of streams.
by atoav | 2026-02-27 15:29:36+00:00
The thing is many of those did not fail at all. They just weren't that great from the start. A overhyped technology is a technology that makes people believe it is going to be something that it isn't and solve issues that it doesn't (or that weren't really issues).

To take the first of the list: 3D TV. Everybody liked the idea of being more immersed in a fictional world. But if you watch closely (I studied both media science and film directing), you will realize that there are already traditional 2D films that are so immersive, parts of the audience dislike these films for the lack of distance between what they are watching and themselves. Which is why I said of the brink of the last 3D hype that this is not going to last. So the issue was for the most part that the problem 3D appeared to be solving wasn't actually a problem, while a whole segment of the market fooled itself and the consumers into this was actually the future.

Blockchain is literally the same and everybody could easily predict it by the point block chain evangelists started trying to find blockchain-shaped problems, when they didn't find any useful legal applications where a traditional chain of trust wasn't vastly superior.

Now LLMs are actually useful. The question is just, how much money is that usefulness worth for a regular person to pay and what does it do to society and the planet as a side-effect.
by zihao-liu-qs | 2026-02-27 15:29:50+00:00
Hi, I’m the author.
When I start reading a new codebase, I usually want two things: 1) the directory structure (I use tree) 2) the line counts by language (I use tokei)
But I couldn’t easily see where the code is actually concentrated across directories.
So I built treekei. It outputs a file tree with line counts, so you can quickly understand how code is distributed in a project at a glance.
Happy to hear feedback or discuss implementation details.
by bonsai_spool | 2026-02-27 15:30:01+00:00
> this undervalues how financial engineering allows more ideas and companies to be funded

I think the comment is about the marginal utility of additional workers at Jane St over, perhaps, DE Shaw Research. The caliber and education of roughly the same kind of person might be applied to understanding drug mechanisms, or shaving off trading milliseconds.

Is the marginal benefit to the world greater if someone is advancing financial engineering? I don't think it's obvious that our increased complexity is, itself, yielding further increases in 'allowing more ideas and companies to be funded' except in the sense where already-wealthy people gain more discretionary income which they may decide to spend on their pet projects. Futures have existed for much longer than derivative markets; are we helping farmers more when we allow futures to be traded more quickly?

But I disagree that the limit is funding—it's simply a lack of concerted interest. We accept that we should spend tax money on rewarding certain financial activities, and we create a system that disproportionately rewards people who facilitate these activities. But we might restructure things so people are incentivized to do research instead of financial engineering.

I think the fundamental idea is that things of value need to be extracted or manufactured at some point and we're not set up to reward people studying new extractive tools or new manufacturing processes when those people could instead work on finance products.
by muzani | 2026-02-27 15:30:15+00:00
They have to save the big T for IPO.

On a tangent, I remember companies like Slack triggering the unicorn craze. They said that it was just better to aim for a billion than some number like 900M or 1.2B, because psychologically, it meant more to employees, investors, and customers.

OpenAI is in that place where nobody really cares for these mind games. It's not very reliable. But it is useful enough to pay for. It's cheap enough to be an impulse purchase where some guy decides to just subscribe to ChatGPT because they're working on an important slide or sketching a logo.
by ralusek | 2026-02-27 15:30:23+00:00
I tinkered with an alternative to stream interfaces:

https://github.com/ralusek/streamie

allows you to do things like

infiniteRecords
.map(item => doSomeAsyncThing(item), { concurrency: 5 });

And then because I found that I often want to switch between batching items vs dealing with single items:

infiniteRecords
.map(item => doSomeAsyncSingularThing(item), { concurrency: 5 })
.map(groupOf10 => doSomeBatchThing(groupsOf10), { batchSize: 10 })
// Can flatten back to single items
.map(item => backToSingleItem(item), { flatten: true });
by rayiner | 2026-02-27 15:30:25+00:00
As someone from a constitutionally socialist and culturally collectivist society, the idea of American millennials embodying either seems to me like cosplay. You guys are so allergic to imposed social obligation you won’t even care for your own parents in their old age. What kind of “collectivism” could you possibly practice?

Collectivism means the subordination of individual autonomy to the governance of the collective according to the needs of the collective. You’re a cog in a machine and your purpose is to serve the collective—starting with your family and radiating in rings out from there. I’m not sure Americans can even understand the collective mindset, much less practice it.
by burningChrome | 2026-02-27 15:30:30+00:00
Not sure if you know this, but both Biden and Trump (in his previous admin) had their DOJ file lawsuits against Google. "United States v. Google LLC," which was filed in 2020 and focused on Google's dominance in search and advertising markets. A separate case was filed in 2023 targeted Google's monopolization of digital advertising technologies. The State of Texas also sued them in 2020.

Google lost all three cases. The DOJ in all three recommended the company be broken up, but the judges disagreed. If you want to blame someone, then blame the judges, not the current admin or Bidens DOJ - both of whom said Google should be broken up.
by lambda | 2026-02-27 15:31:06+00:00
Oh, I do frequently have biscuits and gravy topped with fried eggs, though the biscuits and gravy would definitely pull it further towards the flour end of the spectrum, maybe not quite in the dark region.

Also, hollandaise is pretty integral to eggs benedict, I've had lots of variations but the traditional with poached egg, canadian bacon, english muffin, and hollandaise is really by far the best.
by tdb7893 | 2026-02-27 15:31:15+00:00
I ended up taking an 87% pay cut to get out of advertising specifically and tech in general (eventually it will only be a 60% pay cut once I gave enough experience in the new field). It is too bad that high pay is done by capturing value for yourself. You see this a lot in tech where open source is such a huge net productivity increase but it pays worse than other less useful things.
by hugh-avherald | 2026-02-27 15:31:29+00:00
This does not strike me as an anti-pattern or ugly. Indefinite free period would be unreasonable, and automatically kicking a user off would also probably be bad. A $200 bill shock is not great but it's also at a size that won't cause enormous distress while simultaneously being noticeable enough that you won't pay more than a month over. (As an open-source maintainer already on a Max plan, I still wince every month.) Income-constrained users should not adopt it or should set a reminder well beforehand.

Your suggestion of "we'll evaluate" individually would be a very costly undertaking for Anthropic. Not reasonable. If your suggestion was for Anthropic to evaluate at the end of the 6 months whether to continue the free plan generally, I don't see anything that prevents them from doing so.

I think Anthropic should probably give some notice in the CLI or Claude.ai in the final month of the offer. Not doing that would be a bit ugly.
by toddmorrow | 2026-02-27 15:31:54+00:00
If I wanted a pcb before tariffs, China + shipping << USA + domestic shipping

- I bet that holds true after tariffs. (it does, actually):
PCB Cost: $5.00
Shipping:$5.63
Total:$10.63

- I bet that holds true for custom aluminum parts, etc

for some strange reason, shipping and prices from China << shipping within the USA, still, even after tariffs

"Maker nation" might have been 3D printer company hype. Or just the whole US supply chain is full of price gouging
by mwigdahl | 2026-02-27 15:32:22+00:00
This does not appear to be true if you read the earlier "Activation" section. If you have an existing subscription, it pauses while the free period is active. After that free period, your existing subscription resumes. As I read it, there is no "auto-subscribe" after the free period ends -- you just revert back to whatever you had before (or nothing, if you weren't a subscriber before).

If I'm reading it wrong, let me know.
by 0_____0 | 2026-02-27 15:32:24+00:00
Never understood the hype with Dyson. I suspect that like many successful hardware businesses, their story is mainly of brand strength, not of actual product quality.

If you pick up a Dyson vacuum you'll notice that it just feels flimsy in the hand. I think they're aggressively cost-engineered- the material you save by designing molded parts to be minimally thick has got to be like tens of cents to a couple dollars over the whole machine...
by wat10000 | 2026-02-27 15:32:36+00:00
It should be a reason to criticize them, though. They're tricking people in order to make more money. They know it, you know it, we all know it. They could easily not do this, or if they want to make the argument that it's helpful not to have your subscription suddenly lapse at the end of the period, they could make it an option to have your subscription auto-renew as paid.
by ZenoArrow | 2026-02-27 15:32:52+00:00
> Are you suggesting that a human being writes an OS in a vacuum without seeing any other OS or looking into how it is built. That feels a little facetious, no?

No, I'm suggesting in order for it to be a fair test, you need to impose the same restrictions that a human engineer would face.

For example, consider the work done by the Nouveau team in building a set of open source GPU drivers for NVIDIA GPUs. When they started out the specs were not so widely available. They could look at how GPU drivers were developed for other GPUs, but that is not going to be a substitute for exploratory work. Let's see how well AI does at that exploratory work. I think you'll find it's a lot harder than common uses for AI today.
by azangru | 2026-02-27 15:33:00+00:00
What was it specifically about the style that stood out as incongruous, or that hindered comprehension? What was it that made you stumble and start paying close attention to the style rather than to the message? I am looking at the two examples, and I can't see anything wrong with them, especially in the context of the article. They both employ the same rhetorical technique of antithesis, a juxtaposition of contrasting ideas. Surely people wrote like this before? Surely no-one complained?