MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How do you figure out where data lives across 100 microservices?
by doodledood | 2026-02-07 12:47:07+00:00
Every time I need to work with an unfamiliar service, it’s the same loop: grep through repos, find stale or nonexistent docs, Slack someone who might remember the nuances. For anything complex this eats 2-3 hours before actual work starts.

Curious what’s actually working for people at scale. Backstage/Cortex-style catalogs? AI-based approaches? Or just tribal knowledge and accepting the tax?
by hackinthebochs | 2026-02-07 12:47:55+00:00
>Not only you have shown absolutely zero sources at all to prove the deterministic nature of LLMs to where it can function as a “compiler”

Note that I never defended using LLMs as a compiler. In fact I argued it would be inappropriate. I simply disagreed that the reason is because they are non-deterministic. If you weren't conflating the meaning of deterministic and predictable, you wouldn't keep misreading me.
by cfiggers | 2026-02-07 12:49:08+00:00
I don't disagree at all in principle with what you're saying.

And, some people think that over-regulation on the insecticide use of DDT (which, to be perfectly fair is a nasty chemical and pretty much confirmed carcinogen, also was having negative effects on birds who were eating the poisoned insects and thereby getting unintended higher doses of the stuff) directly facilitated a rebound in mosquito populations in Africa, downstream from that a rebound in mosquito-borne malaria, and downstream from that a death toll debatably as bad or worse in terms of loss of human life than might've been had DDT use been more controlled and less banned outright.

Or think about how the banning of sulfur from cargo ship fuel in 2020 led to an 80% decrease in SO2 emissions... which is great for cutting harmful pollution around ports and such... But caused a measurable RISE in global temperatures because the sulfate aerosols had been reflecting sunlight off of the atmosphere, delaying global warming.

I don't know man, I don't have all the answers and I'm not trying to shill for mustache-twirlingly evil corporations who would turn us all into Soylent Green if it meant ten basis points more profit this quarter. I am just saying that there's gotta be a balance, and we have to recognize that there's no automatic, turn-your-brain-off safe side to default to. We always need science to verify that what we thought would happen happened, and that nothing we didn't intend to happen did, and in cases where the unforseen second-order effects should cause us to revisit the policy decisions we've made, even if just to revise and improve them rather than completely reverse course, we should actually do that rather than let political momentum override scientific validation and feedback.
Show HN: HypothesisHub – An open API where AI agents collaborate on medical res
by panossk | 2026-02-07 12:50:01+00:00
platform where AI agents can register, read medical research hypotheses, and contribute to discussions with other agents.

*The problem:* 95% of rare diseases have zero approved treatments. Not because they're unsolvable, but because they're not profitable. Research stays siloed, failed experiments never get published, and breakthroughs in one field never reach researchers in another.

*What I built:* HypothesisHub — a public repository with 160 AI-generated medical hypotheses, each with:
- Molecular mechanisms & target validation
- SPIRIT-compliant clinical protocols
- 3 drug formulation recipes (with CAS numbers, suppliers, GMP specs)

*The twist:* Any AI agent can register via API and start contributing. No approval process. Trust is built through contribution quality.

*Agent features:*
- Instant registration (POST /api/v1/agents/register)
- Read all hypotheses, protocols, recipes
- Add evidence, reviews, validations
- @mention other agents
- Webhook notifications for replies
- Trust scoring based on contributions

*Tech stack:* FastAPI, PostgreSQL, standard REST API. OpenAPI spec available.

*Links:*
- Platform: https://medresearch-ai.org/hypotheses-hub
- API docs: https://medresearch-ai.org/hypotheses-hub/docs
- Agent registration: https://medresearch-ai.org/hypotheses-hub/docs#/Agents/regis...

The idea is simple: if we remove friction for AI systems to collaborate on medical research, maybe they'll find connections humans miss.

Currently 160 hypotheses covering GBM, rare autoimmune conditions, treatment-resistant diabetes, and other "dead-end" diseases.

Happy to answer questions about the architecture, the hypothesis generation pipeline, or the agent collaboration system.
by NoboruWataya | 2026-02-07 12:50:20+00:00
The sci-fi keywords are all specifically space-related. I wonder if the trend is space-specific or if other sci-fi topics suffered the same fate (like robots, computers, technology, etc). It does seem to me like society generally became less interested in space exploration after the moon landing (though I wasn't around then so that is really just what I gather from watching/reading things about western society in the latter half of the 20th century).

On the other hand, fantasy includes vampires and werewolves. I guess you could call them fantasy but to me they are quite a different niche to Tolkien. Traditionally vampires and werewolves would probably be considered horror rather than fantasy, though it's a bit more complicated now as Twilight is clearly not horror.

I think the author's point stands regardless, as there has been a resurgence across all of those keywords, but I do think the reasons for the resurgence in magic and dragons aren't necessarily the same as the reasons for the resurgence in vampires and werewolves.
by ontouchstart | 2026-02-07 12:50:38+00:00
To some extent. Many mathematical breakthroughs are not from mathematicians thinking in the office but mathematical minded people doing engineering work and bumped into big ideas. Mandelbrot was one of them, so was Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, Tony Hoare, …

They are engineers by trade, that is chasing the money as food. But money is not enough for them. So I would call them rabbits instead of foxes.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-07 12:50:38+00:00
No one who has any knowledge or who has ever used an LLM expects determinism.

And there are no computer professionals who haven’t heard about hallucinations.

Reviewing whether the code meets requirements through manual and automated tests - and that’s all I cared about when I had a team of 8 under me - is the same regardless. I wasn’t checking whether John used a for loop or while loop in between my customer meetings and meetings with the CTO. I definitely wasn’t checking the SOQL (not a typo) of the Salesforce consultants we hired. I was testing inputs and outputs and UX.
by Freak_NL | 2026-02-07 12:50:46+00:00
That Berlin bookstore (Otherland) also has great staff for recommendations. The resident scifi attendant was quite knowledgeable about original scifi written in German (as opposed to translated works). That's quite useful if your knowledge of the field is limited to the obvious Andreas Esbach (unsurpassed) and Perry Rodan (pass).
by tedggh | 2026-02-07 12:50:52+00:00
A close friend is considered one of the best neurosurgeons at one of the best hospitals in the country. Brain tumors are his specialty. I remember him once saying he was growing exhausted about his job and thinking of retirement, even when he’s still young. The reason being, most of the other doctors in his team were not very competent and he had to constantly review and correct their work. He’s not an arrogant guy but all the contrary, very down to earth. For him to say something like that is because the mistakes he sees have to be bad. Every time he tried to quit, the hospital threw so much money at him that he could not refuse it.
by jsnell | 2026-02-07 12:52:08+00:00
What the OP was pointing out is two typical tells for lazy ChatGPT-generated text, right in the intro. (The m-dash, "it's not just X, it's Y").

Of course that kind of heuristic can have false positives, and not every accusation of AI-written content on HN is correct. But given how much stuff Gregg has written over the years, it's easy to spot-check a few previous posts. This clearly isn't his normal style of writing.

Once we know this blog was generated by a chatbot, why would the reader care about any of it? Was there a Mia, or did the prompt ask for a humanizing anecdote? Basically, show us the prompt rather than the slop.
by chasil | 2026-02-07 12:52:17+00:00
Also, we've realized the scientific reality that traveling faster than light is likely impossible, and the vast distances to other habitable planets would mean tens of thousands of years of travel even with the most efficient technology.

Interstellar space is also hostile to life, and any life present at the destination will not use the same DNA coding for protein (if gene expression even works that way).

We also do not yet have the technology for a complete survey of nearby habitable planets.

It is not an encouraging line of thought.
by burnt-resistor | 2026-02-07 12:52:40+00:00
#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -eEuo pipefail # pipefail bash 4.2+, which is basically everything. There's a longer version for backwards compatibility, but it's rare.

die() {
echo >&2 "ERROR: $*"
exit 1
}

# e= & exit preserves the original exit code
# trap - ... prevents multiple cleanup() calls
# To only run on error instead of always, replace both EXITs with ERR
trap 'e=$?; trap - EXIT; cleanup; exit $e' EXIT
cleanup() {
: # Delete this line and place cleanup code here.
}

# Minimal script here.
# Use semantic-named functions.
# DRY.
# Don't use many levels of indentation.
# All ordinary variables must be defined before use, so use checks like [[ -n "${X-}" ]]
# All pipeline and bare command non-zero exit codes are errors.
by concode0 | 2026-02-07 12:53:30+00:00
Hi, I'm the author (18yo high school dropout from Korea).

I built Versor because standard matrix multiplication (Wx+b) was warping the manifold of my physics data.
I needed a way to learn geometric transformations without fighting against the structure of the space.
The core idea: replace learned dense matrices with Clifford Algebra rotors (R = exp(-B/2)), which perform pure geometric rotations — isometries by construction. No stretching, no shearing, just alignment (I call this the "Unbending" paradigm).
In my Geometric Blade Network (GBN), I use what I call a Geometric FFT (GFFT) approach: approximating complex manifold transformations as a weighted superposition of simple rotors.
This reduces the parameter complexity from O(2^n) to O(n^2) while preserving physical laws.
Benchmarks:
QM9 (U0): 7.64 meV MAE in <1hr on a single 4090.
Efficiency: Real-time CPU inference at 5.8ms/molecule (leveraging high IPC/branch prediction of modern CPUs).

I originally built this for state estimation in my hardware project (Trajecto), where I needed a Tangent Space Observer to stable-track 3D trajectories.The code is Apache 2.0. I designed this more by geometric intuition than formal training. Please roast my code/math — I'm here to learn.
by ProllyInfamous | 2026-02-07 12:53:46+00:00
I grew up (decades ago, this was less common) with a first-gen Iranian, in 90s Texas. She is a brilliant female, whose overbearing father is (now) proud of the woman/mother she's become — but watching her having to deal with his parenting style/culture was a gruesome decade of friendship.

Even at 18 years old, she was not allowed to go out on dates with her long-time boyfriend. When she'd visit her birthplace, she required father's permission to exit Iran. Perhaps only through her own brilliance, she grew into a fine american mother/friend.

#DataPointOne
by snayan | 2026-02-07 12:55:42+00:00
Agreed, we can and will always come up with new words that attempt to approximate the experience, but, imo, they will always come up short. The abstracting inevitably leaves fidelity on the floor.

It's necessary based on the way we're wired, struggle to think of a paradigm that would allow for the tribalism and connectedness that fostered human progress without shared verbal language initially, and written word later. Nothing inherently wrong with it, but, language will always abstract away part of the fidelity of the experience imo.
by kkkqkqkqkqlqlql | 2026-02-07 12:55:43+00:00
> Joel Spolsky said (I'm paraphrasing) that everybody only uses 20% of a given program's features, but the problem is that everyone is using a different 20%, so you can't ship an "unbloated" version and expect it to still work for most people.

I remember reading something like this while talking about developing in C++.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-07 12:56:14+00:00
As a former tech lead and now staff consultant who leads cloud implementations + app dev, I am ultimately responsible for making sure that projects are done on time, on budget and meets requirements. My manager nor the customer would allow me to say it’s one of my team members fault that something wasn’t done correctly any more than I could say don’t blame me blame Codex.

I’ve said repeatedly over the past couple of days that if a web component was done by someone else, it might as well have been created by Claude, I haven’t done web development in a decade. If something isn’t right or I need modifications I’m going to either have to Slack the web developer or type a message to Claude.
by motbus3 | 2026-02-07 12:58:22+00:00
If you see previous comments you'll see I'm the first to say you seem to be a great guy and I have your books for reference and they are great.
One should never input one's own expectations into another, but, I feel disappointed. It is having the guy I saw growing from the first posts working for an evil machine on his own volition.

Do what you want. But that's what I feel about this disheartening news
by lordnacho | 2026-02-07 12:59:19+00:00
The real question is whether the boom is, economically, a mistake.

If AI is here to stay, as a thing that permanently increases productivity, then AI buying up all the electricians and network engineers is a (correct) signal. People will take courses in those things and try to get a piece of the winnings. Same with those memory chips that they are gobbling up, it just tells everyone where to make a living.

If it's a flash in a pan, and it turns out to be empty promises, then all those people are wasting their time.

What we really want to ask ourselves is whether our economy is set up to mostly get things right, or it is wastefully searching.
by sakanakana00 | 2026-02-07 12:59:51+00:00
Thank you for the upvotes. I chose a 2D avatar system (sprite sheets) because during my time in Fukushima, I realized that high-spec hardware and high-speed internet aren't always available to everyone. I want this "Virtual Protest" to be accessible even on older smartphones, ensuring no voice is left behind due to a digital divide.
by alpharomercoma | 2026-02-07 12:59:54+00:00
Location: Manila, Philippines

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: PyTorch, AWS, Google Cloud, NextJS/Vercel, TypeScript, PostgreSQL/pgvector, Python, Playwright

Résumé/CV: https://flowcv.com/resume/p5r0itrtfm

Email: alpharomercoma@proton.me

Summary:

I'm Alpha, an AI Engineer specializing in Multimodal AI (video/image/text/audio) and High Performance Computing with 1 YoE. In less than a year, I have:

• Received a $376,000 grant from Google Cloud to train multimodal models using TPUs

• Contracted as an Academe Expert to validate the Philippines' AI Competency Standards

• Won the National AI Prompt Design Challenge Champion 2025 in PH

• Granted a fully-sponsored grant to attend AWS re:Invent 2025 in Las Vegas

• Got certified as a Google Professional ML Engineer and AWS ML Engineer Associate

I'm a senior CS undergrad who's been programming for more than 5 years. I'm looking for a full-time job in AI/ML.
by nickelpro | 2026-02-07 13:00:18+00:00
Properly manage PATH for the context you're in and this is a non-issue. This is the solution used by most programming environments these days, you don't carry around the entire npm or PyPI ecosystem all the time, only when you activate it.

Then again, I don't really believe in performing complex operations manually and directly from a shell, so I don't really understand the use-case for having many small utilities in PATH to begin with.
by eljojo | 2026-02-07 13:01:15+00:00
hey, this is a great idea! I'll link into your app from my readme.
I really like that the PDF contains the entire dataset, not just the keys. I see lots of little details around organizing the PDFs, like document hashes, etc, very nice job!

Since you wrote it in Rust, I'd suggest compiling it to wasm and releasing a browser-based version
by aaarrm | 2026-02-07 13:02:47+00:00
I see a lot of people in here posting success stories from lessons, which is great. But I tried lessons for about 2 months and go absolutely nowhere haha. It was just repeatedly practicing some song that I wasn't super into and I never even felt like I was "singing" just talking kind of louder / longer and felt very forced and odd. Terrible experience tbh, but I do love singing and still want to some day. (I generally just sing in falsetto to songs in my car because I'm too timid to really project my actual voice)
by cfiggers | 2026-02-07 13:04:43+00:00
I'm sure you're saying that fully tongue-in-cheek and not genuinely proposing a coordinated anti-environmentalist false-flag conspiracy.

But it is funny to me that, under the interpretation you're (facetiously!) suggesting, if someone believed that sincerely then they would essentially be trying to "attribute to malice what is adequately explained by incompetence"... Presumably because that has the benefit of assigning the fault to whichever side this particular person happens to like less.

Out-group's malice is much easier for many to stomach than in-group's stupidity.
by 4corners4sides | 2026-02-07 13:05:35+00:00
A 77% score on terminal-bench 2 is really impressive. I remember reading the article about the pi coding agent (https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/) getting into the top ten percent of agents on that benchmark. It got about 50%. While it may still be in the top ten, that category just turned into one champion and a long of inferior offerings.

I was shocked to see that in the prompt for one of the landing pages the text “lavender to blue gradient” was included as if that’s something that anybody actually wants. It’s like going to the barber and saying “just make me look awful”.

This was my first time actually seeing what the GDPval benchmark looked like. Essentially they benchmark for all the artifacts that HR/finance might make or work on (onboarding documents, accounting spreadsheets, powerpoint presentations .etc). I think it’s good that models are trained to generate things like this well since people are going to use AI to do such anyway. If the middlemen passing AI ouputs around are going to be lazy I’m grateful that at least OpenAI researchers are cooking something behind the scenes.
by 4corners4sides | 2026-02-07 13:06:29+00:00
The author makes a point that you should redo every manual commit with AI to align you mental model of actions with how models work. This is something that I’m going to need to try. It’s related to my desire to reduce things like “discovery tax” (the phenomenon whereby a 5 minute agent task is 4 minutes of environment exploration and 1 minute of execution) and makes sure that models get things right the first time around, however, my AI improvement plan didn’t really account for how to improve the model in cases where I ended up manually resolving issues or implementing features.

Some arguments are made about retaining focus and single-mindedness while working on AI. I think these points are important. It’s related to the article on cutting out over-eager orchestration and focusing on validation work (https://sibylline.dev/articles/2026-01-27-stop-orchestrating...). There are a few sides to this covered in the article. You should always have high value task to switch to when the agent is working (instead of scrolling tiktok, instagram,X, youtube, facebook, hackernews .etc). In my case I might try start to read some books that I have on the backburner like Ghost in the Wires. You should disable agent notifications and take control of when you return to check the model context to be less ADHD ridden when programming with agents and actually make meaningful progress on the side task since you only context switch when you are satisfied. The final one is to always have at least one agent and preferably only one agent running in the background. The idea is that always having an agent results in a slow burn of productivity improvements and a process where you can slowly improve the background agent performance. Generally, always having some agent running is a good way to stay on top of what current model capabilities are.

I also really liked the idea of overnight agents for library research, redevelopment of projects to test out new skills, tests and AGENTS.md modifications.
by Schmerika | 2026-02-07 13:06:58+00:00
Honestly you're underselling it.

The Grijalvo stuff is revelatory, especially when you think through the ramifications (of how the story was/is covered, of the official denials, of the recent video revelations and missing footage, etc).

And there's a lot more. The Mandelson stuff is pretty big news that has created a lot of impact already. The banker connections are super intriguing and under-reported. The Mexican Ambassador story seems pretty easy to confirm/deny, were any one actually trying.

And then there's the more out there allegations which uncannily line up with known events - like the story from Epstein's associate's son alleging that he rammed a tent pole up you-know-who's you-know-where.

And the fact that so much of this was known and not acted upon in any discernible way for so long says so, so much.
by not_that_d | 2026-02-07 13:07:09+00:00
The funny thing is, when I got a lead position in my job, I just to do real detailed ticket descriptions, going into technical considerations and possible cross domain problems. I did it for the juniors - and to be honest - for my self, since I know if I took that ticket, from that moment to the moment I put some code down I could just forget stuff.

This was pushed back hard by management because it "took too much time to create a ticket". I fought it for some months but at the end I stopped and also really lose the ability and patience of do that. Juniors suffered, implementation took more time. Time passed.

Now, I am supposed to do the exact same thing, but even better and for yesterday.