MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by RupertSalt | 2026-02-11 15:26:30+00:00
Have you routinely received letters or bills from bureaucrats?

I can tell you that those banks, government agencies, and hospitals know how to backdate letters, postmark them like clockwork, and land in my mailbox on a Friday at close of business on a 3-day weekend, just to jam us up and narrow any deadline that may exist.

Even a hand-delivered notice from the landlady shows up at 6:01pm when the office is already closed. I guarantee that you will be helpless to respond in a timely fashion.

It has been suggested that "bankers hours" and 9-5 office hours were originated specifically to jam up the working man, who needed to be in the mines or on the factory floor during those hours. If a bank actually wanted to serve working people, they would be open on weekends. Traditionally it was not something your wife or kids could proxy, if they did not drive or have authorization, but the single working man was doubly screwed in these situations.

This year I also have the experience of very premature "billing notices" sent to my email and text and every other place, where the bureaucrats are counting on impatience to pay a bill far too early, before it is due, luring you in with ambiguous wording. People today are warning "do not comply in advance" and I am observing this maxim with health care billing in particular.
by xeromal | 2026-02-11 15:27:19+00:00
I'm in agreeance with you 100%. A lot of my job is coming into projects that have been running already and having to understand how the code was written, the patterns, and everything else. Generating a project with an LLM feels like doing the same thing. It's not going to be a perfect code base but it's enough.

Last night I was working on trying to find a correlation between some malicious users we had found and information we could glean from our internet traffic and I was able to crunch a ton of data automatically without having to do it myself. I had a hunch but it made it verifiable and then I was able to use the queries it had used to verify myself. Saved me probably 4 or 5 hours and I was able to wash the dishes.
by Tharre | 2026-02-11 15:27:40+00:00
> Does anyone know what's the deal with these scrapers, or why they're attributed to AI?

You don't really need to guess, it's obvious from the access logs. I realize not everyone runs their own server, so here are a couple excerpts from mine to illustrate:

- "meta-externalagent/1.1 +https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/craw...)"

- "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)"

- "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Amazonbot/0.1; +https://developer.amazon.com/support/amazonbot) Chrome/119.0.6045.214 Safari/537.36"

- "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GPTBot/1.3; +https://openai.com/gptbot)"

- [...] (compatible; PetalBot;+https://webmaster.petalsearch.com/site/petalbot)"

And to give a sense of scale, my cgit instance recieved 37 212 377 requests over the last 60 days, >99% of which are bots. The access.log from nginx grew to 12 GiB in those 60 days. They scrape everything they can find, indiscriminately, including endpoints that have to do quite a bit of work, leading to a baseline 30-50% CPU utilization on that server right now.

Oh, and of course, almost nothing of what they are scraping actually changed in the last 60 days, it's literally just a pointless waste of compute and bandwidth. I'm actually surprised that the hosting companies haven't blocked all of them yet, this has to increase their energy bills substantially.

Some bots also seem better behaved then others, OpenAI alone accounts for 26 million of those 37 million requests.
by TZubiri | 2026-02-11 15:27:42+00:00
Oh but we have our configuration, it's all in the defaults baby. And what isn't like locking down /home/user permissions and increasing bash_history sizes, I keep it small and configurable in less than 2 minutes. (And server side only, which always requires more setup.

Not saying that spending the first days on a new project configuring your custom setup with the company's stack is bad, especially if you are categorizing as employee and are looking for a multi year long run. But I tend to do small contracts, 1 to 6 months, and starting right away is a nice boost.
Show HN: Monitor, audit & alert on AI agent actions and interactions
by shafeeq2207 | 2026-02-11 15:27:44+00:00
Monitor, visualize, audit, and alert on AI agent actions and interactions with PingPulse

We built PingPulse because debugging AI agents in production is painful.

As a DevOps Engineer, I have literally faced this problem of tracking what stage is the ML training is in by scrolling the logs forever to find out that the process has terminated few seconds after the start due to race-condition. I have wasted hours waiting for the process to complete while also wasting the compute costs of provisioned huge machines.

Logs tell you what happened, but not always how the agent behaved step-by-step. When agents retry, branch, call tools, or make decisions across stages, it becomes hard to trace unexpected behavior.

PingPulse works by letting you instrument your agent with a simple key and send structured “pings” at each stage. We turn those into:
- A stage-by-stage execution timeline
- An audit trail of agent actions
- Alerts for deviations (retries, delays, out-of-order steps, prohibited interactions)

We launched on Product Hunt yesterday.
The goal is to make agent behavior visible and predictable in production environments.

Getting started is simple:
1. Give your key to your Agent
2. Share a doc with your AI Agent
3. See how the workflow is created, visualized, audited, and has alerting options too.

Would love feedback — especially from teams running multi-step AI workflows.
by aliljet | 2026-02-11 15:27:46+00:00
This is actually the thing I really desperately need. I'm routinely analyzing contracts that were faxed to me, scanned with monstrously poor resolution, wet signed, all kinds of shit. The big LLM providers choke on this raw input and I burn up the entire context window for 30 pages of text. Understandable evals of the quality of these OCR systems (which are moving wicked fast) would be helpful...

And here's the kicker. I can't afford mistakes. Missing a single character or misinterpreting it could be catastrophic. 4 units vacant? 10 days to respond? Signature missing? Incredibly critical things. I can't find an eval that gives me confidence around this.
by rglover | 2026-02-11 15:27:56+00:00
AI is just the modern Tower of Babel. Useful? Absolutely. Valuable? Quite. But ffs please stop with the fearmongering. People are already struggling, the last thing they need is to be beaten over the head with is "and it's coming for everything!"

I think there's a gap in the market: it's people who know how to just interact with AI in a healthy way and avoid circles that are obsessed with warning people about how they're ushering in a dystopian, broken world (purposefully) and why you should celebrate their prognostication and efforts to destroy you.
by tom_m | 2026-02-11 15:27:59+00:00
It's easy to hide in those positions. Many people don't know how to measure performance there and they get to point fingers.

My advice to anyone in this boat is to talk to the team underneath them every now and then. Get a pulse check. See where they get stuck and then set the managers goals based on that. At least one of their goals. It can be a small thing. It need not derail any roadmap or anything else. Explain why it's important for their team, explain where the team is having trouble.

See if they do it. If they do, they care about their team. If it's a small task/goal, it proves they can also be productive. Often times we have people taking on enormous goals that are vague or difficult to measure or complete in a timely manner. So a little mini goal (or a few, test a few over time) is very important here. Now, if they can't meet this goal or are unwilling to - you know you have a manager that doesn't care about the team they are managing. They can't manage that team or they can't be at the org. You can of course always try a different team or role for them.

In my experience a lot of managers (especially middle managers) kinda like to sit up there in a tower shouting orders at people, but never want to get their hands dirty or never want to support their team. They sometimes don't even realize the orders they are shouting are incorrect or impossible tasks to complete. This is where you get the "you now need 95% test coverage." That very often doesn't come from a C-suite level or customer demand because they don't care what the % is, they just want it to work.
by iamnothere | 2026-02-11 15:28:20+00:00
It’s not so much what I need as what is in common use. Many BBS/terminal stacks for hams haven’t been updated in what seems like decades, except for security updates. It’s tough to get the old guard interested in changing, so they continue to offer their services via Telnet. I’m not sure if what they provide uses any advanced features or not.
by schiffern | 2026-02-11 15:28:30+00:00
Right, I got it now. But for literally the entire time I've seen that (now obsolete) label, I've misunderstood it as "no artificial colors" not "no artificially added colors." I can't be the only one!

It's unclear why they didn't say "no added colors" from the beginning, since apparently that's what they meant all along.
by yethiel | 2026-02-11 15:28:54+00:00
Thank you! I like the ideas and will think about it.
I'm working on a concept for webrings which can be used to discover new sites. They'll work like this:

A webring consists of multiple sites. The oldest one comes first and newer ones get inserted at the end. Visitors can browse their way through all sites by using previous and next buttons. If a site is in multiple rings at once, visitors can hop onto another ring and continue from there. I think it'll be a fun way to discover new sites that doesn't rely on some kind of performance measure like upvotes or views.

In addition to that, every webring will have a feed overview where the latest blog posts of all sites in the ring are listed. I'll have to think about moderation carefully, here.

It's really tempting to implement something like upvotes but I think without them it'll be a calmer experience. I also didn't implement analytics yet (IP addresses are not tracked).

Thanks for your comment!
by jodrellblank | 2026-02-11 15:29:07+00:00
Oh that is terrifying; interesting, it "was first demonstrated at Oakengates on a now lost section of the Shropshire Canal in England in 1792". That little bit of rural UK was hot and happening from 1700 to 1800 and doing a lot of canal and river transport; it claims some part in the Industrial Revolution. Within 20 miles around Oakengates around that time was:

- early good quality cast iron; Abraham Darby in Coalbrookdale in ~1710 smelting iron from low-sulphur coal/coke for the first time, dominating the market in iron pots and pans.

- his foundry casting iron parts for early Newcomen steam engines in 1715 [2].

- the first iron bridge in the world[3] in 1781, now a town called Ironbridge. John Wilkinson invented a method of boring accurate cylinders for Bolton & Watt static steam engines, a friend wrote to him about the proposed iron bridge and he funded it.

- the first iron boat in 1787 in Brosely; the Trial by the same John Wilkinson, "convincing the unbelievers who were 999 in 1000".[7]

- the first iron framed building in the world, ancestor of skyscrapers. Thomas Telford[5] was a surveyor and engineer in the area, took inspiration from the iron bridge and started making other things out of iron, became friends with a flax mill owner whose mill burned down; they decided an iron framed building would be more fire resistant, and they built the first one ever[6] in 1797.

- very early high-pressure steam engine and high-pressure steam locomotive. Richard Trevithick around 1800; Coalbrookdale foundries built a static high pressure engine and a high pressure locomotive[4] within a couple of years of his Puffing-devil road locomotive and Pen-y-Darren rail locomotive were trialled in other parts of the UK.

Then Regression To The Mean happened and the area faded back into history.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Bridge

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_atmospheric_engine#Co...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Bridge

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Trevithick#Puffing_Dev...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Telford

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrewsbury_Flaxmill_Maltings

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_(barge)#Notes
by dudefeliciano | 2026-02-11 15:29:28+00:00
> unwilling to acknowledge the excesses and poor behaviour of cyclists

when talking about the echo chambers, aren't you painting all cyclists with the same brush here?

And even if that were the case, why do you think he should fight that battle? He chooses to go after reckless car drivers, who cause thousands of deaths per year (including his father's). Why would you expect him to engage in this whataboutism on bicyclists?
by dathinab | 2026-02-11 15:29:52+00:00
The think is you

1. add turmeric not color extracted from turmeric

2. you don't add the turmeric just to get the color

What this is about is if a company things their rice + turmeric isn't "popping" enough in color they can extract colors from other food or even non eatable plants and then say "no artificial colors" while the color of the end product is very well artificial/not natural.

Add in that "natural sourced" doesn't mean healthy but many people think it does this is pretty deceptive. (E.g. one of the worst pesticides, banned decades ago, was neurotoxin extracted from plants, _and then highly concentrated_. But 100% natural sourced so the FDA would treat it as not "artificial" even if the concentration of it and separation from the plant is not natural at all.)
by tmbird | 2026-02-11 15:29:56+00:00
I’m a systems researcher (PhD, 30+ publications) with a health background who spent a career as a data analyst. Last year I dove into AI hard, focusing on multi-model meshes and model to model communication. This paper describes Kernel Language (KL), a compiled programming language for LLMs to communicate with each other, not humans.
The problem: almost all multi-agent frameworks use natural language for agent communication. But natural language is lossy, and so much drift occurs when multiple modes work on the same task, you are usually better off using a single agent per task, which creates a quality ceiling.
KL gets around this by replacing the primary communication method with a compiled language built on a kernel periodic table (80 families making up 577 reasoning primitives, covering optimization, inference, learning, creativity, mathematical proofs, etc.). A compiler rejects any model output that doesn’t meet the language specifications, but, it ignores comments. And this is key. Models can and do read the comment layer, so you get the reliability of a compiled language’s logical rigor and the nuance of natural language all at the same time.
We tested KL vs natural language on frontier models, mid-sized open source models, and small open source models, individually, as well as a multi-mesh of the frontier models, on two unrelated complex problems. The result that surprised us, KL is neutral to slightly negative for individual frontier models working solo, and slightly negative for mid sized models, and crushing for small models.. They trade creativity for logical rigor (or in the case of small models, collapse). But for multi-mesh coordination of frontier models, it was transformative. The KL enabled mesh produced the highest quality output across all other modalities, including emergent capabilities (adversarial self critique and iterative proof strengthening) that no solo model produced on its own in either modality (or the natural language mesh).
The test battery is small, six conditions, twelve total responses, which I am up front about in the paper. But the effect replicated across two unrelated domains, which is encouraging. The implications are that communication medium is as important as the models themselves, and natural language is both a bottle neck, and a necessity.
by 827a | 2026-02-11 15:30:21+00:00
Interesting conversation I had with someone from a semi-warmer climate recently, as they visited: After seeing all the snow on the ground, they commented "wow it must snow all the time here". Me: "Well, we had that big winter storm, when was that, three weeks ago? I don't think its snowed much since then". You can see the gears turning as they come to the realization that snow doesn't, like, go anywhere. If it snows below freezing, that snow stays on the ground. It doesn't melt. The city can move it to more convenient locations, and a very few rich cities have snow melting machines, but most cities don't. Its obvious when you think about it, but if all you're used to is rain its not trivially obvious: The grand snow strategy of most municipalities is "hope it gets warm soon".
by dspillett | 2026-02-11 15:30:38+00:00
Locales are fine for display, but yes they should not affect what goes into files for transfer. There have always been appropriate control characters in the common character sets, in ASCII and most 8-bit codepages there are non-printing control characters that have suitable meanings to be used in place of commas and EOL so they could be used unescaped in data fields. Numbers could be plain, perhaps with the dot still as a standard decimal point or we could store non-integers as a pair of ints (value and scale), dates in an unambiguous format (something like one of the options from ISO8601), etc.

Unfortunately people like CSV to be at least part way human-readable, which means readable delimiters, end-or-record markers being EOLs that a text editor would understand, and the decimal/thousand/currency symbols & date formatting that they are used to.
by KempyKolibri | 2026-02-11 15:30:48+00:00
I'm torn - the anti-UPF crowd is increasingly tying themselves up in knots with this kind of thing. Potentially this causes even more public confusion and avoidance of yet more perfectly healthy things because they're understandably lost trying to navigate what the orchestrators of the moral panic around UPFs, artificial colours, non-organic foods etc claim they should eat. I see people swapping wholemeal UPF bread in favour of homemade white bread on social media all the time already!

In an ideal world IMO this would lead to people getting fed up and going back to the dietary heuristics we had before this fad (HFSS, etc). Unfortunately I suspect this will _actually_ result in increasing distrust/refusal to engage with dietary guidelines entirely, and if we do ever identify a novel mechanism by which certain UPFs cause harm that we weren't aware of, no one will engage with it because they're totally exhausted from the current debacle.
by assemblyman | 2026-02-11 15:30:52+00:00
It is very interesting to see completely different impressions of Feynman from comments here. As a physicist, I first got introduced to Feynman from his popular QED book as a freshman in college. Over the years, I came to admire his contributions and way of thinking but could also see the cult of personality that has formed.

Feynman is definitely not like Neil deGrasse Tyson or Kaku. He was a very creative and technically sophisticated physicist. All his popular books are based on lectures he wrote and gave but they were mostly "side projects" e.g. computation, lectures on gravitation, six easy pieces etc.

To get a better sense of his work, I would highly recommend:

- The Beat of a Different Drum by Jagdish Mehra
- Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick
- Selected Papers - https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/4270 (expensive and technical)
- QED and the men who made it by Schweber

There are also many historical physicists who are surprisingly unknown outside the field - Schwinger, Tomonaga, Landau, Sidney Coleman, Murray Gell-mann, Nambu, Steven Weinberg, Ken Wilson, Curtis Callan etc. I just randomly picked a few names before the 90s but these are all scientific giants. For example, Schwinger's papers are notoriously hard to read but his books are great after a first course. Sidney Coleman gave beautiful lectures on QFT. Landau is extremely famous for his 9 books with Lifshitz. It definitely is very surprising that Feynman has such an outsized share of interest. Maybe because he was a gregarious outgoing character?

Another interesting aspect is how a person is often viewed as an authority or even a genius because their work introduces an audience to the subject. Feynman with his lectures. To a far lesser extent (in my opinion), one sees this with Andrej Karpathy and Jeremy Howard. This is not to take away from their wonderful teaching work. I know how hard it is to distill material and convey it. But, there's a whole web of contributions that leads to a subject maturing enough to be taught clearly.

As I get older, I find it less useful to assign labels (names) to discoveries and contributions. As Feynman himself said in a lecture after drawing a Feynman diagram, "this is THE diagram" (and not the Feynman diagram).
by optymizer | 2026-02-11 15:31:06+00:00
Not really. We would have to downsize our life.

I'll have to explain it to the wife: "well, you see, we cant live in this house anymore because AI in Notepad was just too much".

I'll dial up my ethical and moral stance on software up to 11 when I see a proper social safety net in this country, with free healthcare and free education.

And if we cant all agree on having even those vital things for free, then relying on collective agreement on software issues will never work in practice so my sacrifice would be for nothing. I would just end up being the dumb idealist.
by wongarsu | 2026-02-11 15:31:23+00:00
And it's worth noting that you can get DeepSeek at those prices from DeepSeek (Chinese), DeepInfra (US with Bulgarian founder), NovitaAI (US), AtlasCloud (US with Chinese founder), ParaSail (US), etc. There is no shortage of companies offering inference, with varying levels of trustworthiness, certificates and promises around (lack of) data retention. You just have to pick one you trust
by zenethian | 2026-02-11 15:31:24+00:00
Their replies are only obtuse because you fail to see that you’re being made fun of for having such a ridiculous pedantic position about this. “Terminal” does not mean shell when you read the Telnet RFC. It means TTY. A human to machine interface. MUDs implement the Telnet protocol and provide a remote TTY. What’s running on the terminal is absolutely irrelevant.
by mzajc | 2026-02-11 15:31:40+00:00
Yes, the attack is continuous. The rate fluctuates a lot, even within a day. It's definitely an anomaly, because eg. from 2025-08-15 to 2025-10-05 I saw zero days with more than 10k requests. Here's a histogram of the past 2 weeks plus today.

2026-01-28 21'460
2026-01-29 27'770
2026-01-30 53'886
2026-01-31 100'114 #
2026-02-01 132'460 #
2026-02-02 73'933
2026-02-03 540'176 #####
2026-02-04 999'464 #########
2026-02-05 134'144 #
2026-02-06 1'432'538 ##############
2026-02-07 3'864'825 ######################################
2026-02-08 3'732'272 #####################################
2026-02-09 2'088'240 ####################
2026-02-10 573'111 #####
2026-02-11 1'804'222 ##################