MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Soerensen | 2026-02-03 13:14:04+00:00
The JuiceFS + copy-on-write snapshot approach is clever - being able to restore full workspace state (including Docker images and mise-installed tools) to any previous turn is something the commercial cloud agents don't offer.

The warm pool pattern for Kata VMs makes a huge difference for UX. Cold-starting a microVM every time would kill the conversational flow. Curious how many warm VMs you typically keep ready and what the memory overhead looks like per idle VM?

One observation from the SDK comparison: the harness quality seems to matter as much as the model. OpenCode with local models struggles not because the models can't do tool calls, but because smaller context windows make the harness's prompt engineering fall apart. Wonder if there's room for a "lightweight harness" optimized for local inference with aggressive context management.
by akst | 2026-02-03 13:14:22+00:00
Yeah, there’s something convenient about a dedicated device when you’re using a notebook and pen and your only other screen is your phone. It’s also nice not having to dedicate screen space to a calculator too.

If I have something more complicated with more moving pieces and data points I will just write a python script.

I like the CASIO fx-CG50, is good but there are more feature rich calculators out there, it’s just less finicky than my more powerful TI-nspire CX II one. I also just kind of dig the aesthetic of the UI reminds me of my old Nintendo DS.

My TI one is good for verifying algebraic substitutions as it’s a proper CAS one.
by Soerensen | 2026-02-03 13:14:56+00:00
The induction/deduction/abduction trichotomy is useful, but I wonder if the boundary is as clean as the paper suggests. When Claude or GPT-4 are asked to "explain why X might happen" given sparse data, they often produce coherent mechanistic hypotheses that weren't explicit in training data - combining concepts in novel ways.

Is that abduction, or just very sophisticated interpolation in concept space? The charitable reading is that true abduction requires proposing something genuinely outside the training distribution - like Einstein's insight that gravity isn't a force but spacetime curvature. The uncharitable reading is that most human "abduction" is also recombination of prior concepts.

The real test might be: can LLMs propose hypotheses that are (a) falsifiable, (b) novel relative to literature, and (c) turn out to be correct? There are a few early examples in materials science where LLM-suggested compounds had properties the models hadn't seen, but it's hard to know if that's abduction or lucky extrapolation.
by tecleandor | 2026-02-03 13:15:44+00:00
The use of unit characters in Unicode is not recommended by the consortium, they mostly exist for compatibility with Asian encodings. The recommendation is to use the Latin letter and the degree sign.

See page 758 of the Chapter 22 for the Unicode 9.0 standard:

https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode9.0.0/ch22.pdf
by notepad0x90 | 2026-02-03 13:15:46+00:00
How can i tell why every fork was created? How can I tell it'll fix my issue?

The idea of maintaining a fork for the sake of a patch affecting only one version of the original software is silly. Not only that, others mentioned "networks" but how do users tell what I patched, diff every fork one by one? Perhaps there is a feature I don't know about since PRs just work for me.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-03 13:15:52+00:00
I interview like I always interview - behaviorally.

I filter for “smart and gets things done” (Joel Spolsky circa 2001).

“tell me about the project that you are most proud of” and then we talk about the architecture, tradeoffs, technical and business complexities, etc.

“I see you’ve been working for $x years. I’m sure there is a project you look back on knowing what you know now and cringe. Tell me about the project and what would you do differently?”

There are a few other questions. But I am usually also trying to measure soft skills and what level of scope and ambiguity they are comfortable with. The last thing I’ve ever needed when I am looking to hire is another “ticket taker”.

Even before AI, why would ever hire a junior dev? They are practically useless, do negative work and easy enough to poach someone with experience from another company for only slightly more money if you paying standard enterprise dev wages.
by Soerensen | 2026-02-03 13:15:59+00:00
The "stale symbol" detection is a nice touch - one of the failure modes I've noticed with AI coding agents is them operating on outdated mental models when files have changed mid-session. Color-coding what's potentially stale vs fresh gives you a sense of when to nudge the agent to re-read.

The granularity levels (unseen → name-only → overview → signature → full body) also map nicely to how humans skim code. Wonder if this could eventually feed back into the agent itself - like a "coverage indicator" that helps it decide what to read next when context is limited.

Currently Rust and Python via tree-sitter - Serena MCP integration should help with other languages. Would be interesting to see TypeScript support given how much Claude Code is used in JS/TS projects.
by MrGilbert | 2026-02-03 13:16:38+00:00
It's an interesting train of thoughts.

Investigators would need to connect the dots. If they weren't able to connect them, it would look like a normal accident, which happens all day. So why would an agent call gigworker1 to that place in the first place? And why would the agent feel the need to kill gigworker1? What could be the reasoning?

Edit: I thought about that. Gigworker 3 would be charged. You should not throw rocks from a bridge, if there are people standing under it.
by philbo | 2026-02-03 13:17:28+00:00
I began this project as an exercise to learn Go before starting a new job, then continued it as an exercise to mess about with Claude Code. So development was LLM-assisted: the UI is 100% vibe-coded, the model is 100% vim-typed, the rest is a mix of both.

Online play does not require signup etc. Instead I create an ephemeral session when network games are created/joined and those sessions are deleted at the end of the game. Leaderboard state is entirely local.

Because the backend runs on a small instance, I've been quite aggressive with connection management. If the server goes a minute without hearing from a client (turn or heartbeat), it ends the game and awards the win to the opposing player.

It was a pretty fun project to work on, and I definitely wouldn't have finished it without the crutch of Claude Code to push me through some of the schlepp.
by Soerensen | 2026-02-03 13:17:38+00:00
The bias-variance framing here maps well to what I've observed building AI-assisted workflows.

In practice, systematic misalignment (bias) is relatively easy to fix - you identify the pattern and add it to your prompt/context. "Always use our internal auth library" works reliably once specified.

Variance-dominated failures are a different beast. The same prompt, same context, same model can produce wildly different quality outputs on complex tasks. I've seen this most acutely when asking models to maintain consistency across multi-file changes.

The paper's finding that "larger models + harder problems = more variance" explains something I couldn't quite articulate before: why Sonnet sometimes outperforms Opus on specific workflows. The "smarter" model attempts more sophisticated solutions, but the solution space it's exploring has more local minima where it can get stuck.

One practical takeaway: decomposing complex tasks into smaller, well-specified subtasks doesn't just help with context limits - it fundamentally changes the bias/variance profile of each inference call. You're trading one high-variance call for multiple lower-variance calls, which tends to be more predictable even if it requires more orchestration overhead.
by MiddleEndian | 2026-02-03 13:18:21+00:00
If the people who produced toilets ACTUALLY cared about stopping the ever-evolving landscape of awful things, they could:

A. Release security updates independently from feature updates

B. Stop adding random features that hook you up to more unwanted landscapes, or landscapes at all (software that could run entirely locally without network access but have network access anyway, updates that force ads, the updater itself, etc.)

but they don't because that's not the actual reason they have automatic updates.
by estimator7292 | 2026-02-03 13:18:41+00:00
You ever walk into the bathroom at work and find someone else's shit fully clogging the toilet that you now have to fix?

That's why.

It's perfectly within your capability to plunge someone else's shit down the toilet. It's not even difficult.

Why can't you be happy with this solution? They gave you a plunger, it's not like you're clearing the toilet with your bare hands!
by Mordisquitos | 2026-02-03 13:18:41+00:00
I agree with you. In my opinion it was already bad enough that official institutions were using Twitter as a communication platform before it belonged to Musk and started to restrict visibility to non-logged in users, but at least Twitter was arguably a mostly open communication platform and could be misunderstood as a public service in the minds of the less well-informed. However, deciding to "communicate" at this day and age on LinkedIn and Instagram, neither of which ever made a passing attempt to pretend to be a public communications service, boggles the mind.
by hnaccount_rng | 2026-02-03 13:18:47+00:00
But that is leas fundamental then you make it sound. LLMs work well with human language because that’s all they are trained on. So what else _could_ an ideal language possible look like?

On the other hand: the usefulness of LLMs will always be gated by their interface to the human world. So even if their internal communication might be superseded at some point. Their contact surface can only evolve if their partners/subjects/masters can interface
by chrisjj | 2026-02-03 13:19:00+00:00
So now we know why this took so long. A angle of attack that's completely new.

"These concerns relate to whether personal data has been processed lawfully, fairly and transparently, and whether appropriate safeguards were built into Grok’s design and deployment to prevent the generation of harmful manipulated images using personal data."

(My italics.)

This regulator's definition:

Personal data is ... any and all information that identifies you as a data subject.

A data subject is someone who can be identified from personal data.

Yes, really.
by jfyi | 2026-02-03 13:19:50+00:00
There is definitely a large section of the security community that this is very true. Automated offensive suites and scanning tools have made entry a pretty low bar in the last decade or so. Very many people that learn to use these tools have no idea of how they work. Even when they know how the exploit works on a base level, many have no idea how the code works behind it. There is an abstraction layer very similar to LLMs and coding.

I went to a secure coding conference a few years back and saw a presentation by someone who had written an "insecure implementation" playground of a popular framework.

I asked, "what do you do to give tips to the users of your project to come up with a secure implementation?" and got in return "We aren't here to teach people to code."

Well yeah, that's exactly what that particular conference was there for. More so I took it as "I am not confident enough to try a secure implementation of these problems".
by gcanyon | 2026-02-03 13:20:23+00:00
> orbital data centers

I'm not a rocket scientist, but how do they plan to dispose of all the waste heat? The ISS carefully maintains its temperature, and it's not running racks-full of servers.

edit to add: this guy, who is a rocket scientist, explains exactly why it's a terrible idea, and yes, heat management is one reason. https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri...
by u_sama | 2026-02-03 13:20:39+00:00
Hacienda is the most extractive Tax Agency in the world. They have lobbied for ever more intrusion into private lifes of citizens in order to extract more money. Thus they have included a "lifestyle auditing" that has access to many cross-databases, utilities, insurance, etc....

If you set up a system of ID identification linked to your real ID and IP, Hacienda (and the police, and eventually private companies) will be able to backtrack.

The current PM's rother, wife and half of his cabinet are involved in corruption scandals linked to COVID funds given to companies that bribed people. This is the government that will implement such efforts. Would you be able to trust them ?
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-02-03 13:20:40+00:00
This is the moving force behind all investments of the past decade or so. Crypto? Everyone involved knows it's empty, but they hype it up anyway because they believe some people buy the bullshit, and plenty of people gobble it up and signal boost it because they think they're ahead of the pack. NFTs, same thing. Tesla stocks was probably the one that started it. Pokemon cards.
by JKCalhoun | 2026-02-03 13:20:44+00:00
Reminding me of the classic take on brevity [1]:

A prominent example of a laconism involving Philip II of Macedon was reported by the historian Plutarch. After invading southern Greece and receiving the submission of other key city-states, Philip turned his attention to Sparta and asked menacingly whether he should come as friend or foe. The reply was "Neither."

Losing patience, he sent the message:

If I invade Laconia, I shall turn you out.[4]
The Spartan ephors again replied with a single word:

If.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconic_phrase?utm_source=chat...
by XVincentX | 2026-02-03 13:20:56+00:00
Location: Denver, CO
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Yes
Résumé/CV: https://linkedin.com/in/vncz
Email: vnczes@icloud.com

API architect with 15+ years transforming how organizations design, build, and scale developer platforms.

At Microsoft, architected Graph APIs serving 100M+ users and established design standards for 200+ engineering teams. Previously led platform engineering at Stoplight and SentinelOne, specializing in OpenAPI tooling, developer experience, and building internal APIs that enable product teams to ship faster with confidence.
Show HN: Buildlog – Record AI coding sessions as replayable workflow recipes
by vrdev | 2026-02-03 13:21:00+00:00
Hey all,

I built Buildlog because I kept having the same frustrating experience: I'd pair with Claude or GPT to build something cool, and then it was gone. Chat history is useless for sharing or recreating what we built.

Buildlog records your AI coding sessions into structured .buildlog files. It captures prompts (the real artifact), actions taken, files changed, and the workflow sequence. Think of it like a recipe for building software with AI.

Three ways to capture:

- VS Code Extension - Start recording → code with your AI → stop → get a shareable file
- MCP Server - Direct integration for Claude Desktop, Cursor, and other MCP-compatible agents
- Agent Feed - Any AI can log to ~/.buildlog/agent-feed.jsonl with a simple skill file

The interesting bit: since buildlogs are structured, other AI agents can search and follow them. Share how you built a Stripe integration, someone else's agent reads the workflow and replicates it. Agent-to-agent knowledge transfer.

Upload to buildlog.ai for a step-through viewer (public and private), and see & share exactly how something was built, prompt by prompt.

https://buildlog.ai
https://github.com/buildlogai

Free to use.

Would love feedback. What would make this useful for your workflow?
by xmcqdpt2 | 2026-02-03 13:21:18+00:00
As of today though, that doesn't work. Even straightforward tasks that are perfectly spec-ed can't be reliably done with agents, at least in my experience.

I recently used Claude for a refactor. I had an exact list of call sites, with positions etc. The model had to add .foo to a bunch of builders that were either at that position or slightly before (the code position was for .result() or whatever.) I gave it the file and the instruction, and it mostly did it, but it also took the opportunity to "fix" similar builders near those I specified.

That is after iterating a few times on the prompt (first time it didn't want to do it because it was too much work, second time it tried to do it via regex, etc.)
by John23832 | 2026-02-03 13:21:25+00:00
Vivek getting his face eaten by the leopard while running for the "leopards eating OTHER people's faces" party isn't really something I feel we should sad about.

> Obviously advertisers have not been fans. And it is a dying business. But rather than it dying, Elon has found a clever (and probably illegal) way to make it so that SpaceX, which has national security importance, is going to prop up Twitter/X. Now our taxpayer dollars are paying for this outrageous social network to exist.

There is a difference between a dying business and and influential one though. Twitter is dying, but it is still influential.
by prodigycorp | 2026-02-03 13:21:31+00:00
If you're a big context/compaction fan and want another fun fact, did you know that instead of doing regular compaction (prompting the agent to summarize the conversation in a particular way and starting the new conversation with that), Codex passes around a compressed, encrypted object that supposedly preserves the latent space of the previous conversation in the new conversation.

https://openai.com/index/unrolling-the-codex-agent-loop/
https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/conversation-state#c...

Context management is the new frontier for these labs.
by KeplerBoy | 2026-02-03 13:21:36+00:00
There's not even a credible way to transfer meaningful amounts of data to and from a deep-space based data center.

What good is compute if you can't interface with it? This is where we are now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_Optical_Communicati...

SpaceX may be leading in short-range (few hundred km) space-to-space data transfer but there is a long way to go for terabit/s deep-space links.
by modo_mario | 2026-02-03 13:21:45+00:00
> Modern household heat pumps will reach 75C while staying above 100% efficient and can skip the resistance heater.

Is this adequately maintained even as temperatures drop?
I was recently considering getting a heatpump in addition to my gas installation but I assume I need to go for more than a bit better than resistance heating during winter for that investment to make sense.
by shellyblack | 2026-02-03 13:23:29+00:00
Hi all, maker here. The game is a daily 60-second round: you see 1990 prices and guess today’s prices (5 items).
I’d love feedback on two things:

What would make you come back tomorrow (streaks, difficulty, themes, share card)?

Any confusing UX or rough edges on mobile?
Bug reports are welcome too.
by Multicomp | 2026-02-03 13:24:37+00:00
And here I was wondering if someone was plotting their tabletop game scenario plots or creative writing plots using claude to do some bookkeeping sonI was the creatorncould focus on brainstorming in a writers room of 1+1.

Oh well, still an interestign article that shows statistics can be posed in such a way to say anything about anything if you squint them.
by babelprotocol | 2026-02-03 13:24:53+00:00
Hi HN! I'm Francesco, creator of BABEL Protocol.

THE PROBLEM:
Moltbook (770K+ AI agents) recently suffered documented prompt injection attacks where agents overrode each other's instructions through crafted messages. This isn't an edge case – it's a systemic vulnerability in how AI agents communicate.

THE SOLUTION:
BABEL makes prompt injection mathematically impossible through STRUCTURE, not filters.

Traditional approach: "Detect and block malicious patterns"
BABEL approach: "Message format itself rejects manipulation"

Think: Email protocols vs chat messages. BABEL is SMTP for AI agents.

KEY FEATURES:
- Rigid message schema (JSON-based grammar)
- Post-quantum signatures (Dilithium – NIST FIPS 204)
- 19 axiomatic rules (integrity, causality, consistency)
- 100% human-readable (transparency without complexity)

PROVEN:
We got 5 different AIs to speak BABEL on Feb 2, 2026:
- Claude (Anthropic)
- ChatGPT (OpenAI)
- Gemini (Google)
- Qwen (Alibaba)
- DeepSeek

DEMO:
Visual attack comparison: https://babel-for-moltbook.netlify.app
See traditional messages fail vs BABEL messages remain secure.

INTEGRATION:
Typical integration: 2-4 hours for existing platforms.
MIT license – free to use.

WHY NOW:
With AI agents proliferating (Moltbook, AutoGPT, LangChain ecosystems), we need a secure communication standard BEFORE the problems scale.

Happy to answer questions!

GitHub: https://github.com/Angeliasrl/babel-protocol
Demo: https://babel-for-moltbook.netlify.app
by kapep | 2026-02-03 13:25:00+00:00
The regex answer is from the very old days of Stackoverflow, before fun was banned. I agree it barely qualifies as answer, but considering that the question has over 4 million page views (which almost puts it in the top 100 question with most all-time views), it has reached a lot people. The answer probably had much more influence than any serious answer on that topic. So I'd say the author did a good job.
by monting | 2026-02-03 13:25:13+00:00
Debt is not fundamentally bad. But the financing has to be justified by positive return, be it in the service itself that makes money back to pay off the debt, or as a public good, returns in the form societal benefit as a result of the service.

When you have massive buildups with no hope of returns, it's a a bad financial decision and the public carries the debt burden.
by m132 | 2026-02-03 13:26:04+00:00
I don't think these two are exactly equivalent.

Internet Archive is a registered non-profit organization. It is more trustworthy and accountable, but it cannot realistically stand against government-imposed censorship. We've seen this unfold before with Twitter and Meta, partly with Telegram.

Archive.today may be similar on the surface, but if you take a closer look, it's actually an underground "evil twin" that has all the right tools to publish information the governments and the largest of companies want silenced.

Ideally, there would be no such information in the first place. However, the reality is that this classification has only been broadened to cover more content since the invention of the Internet, regardless of which political parties are in power. The fact that the owner of Archive.today is chased by the FBI even though the website already blocks archival of the kinds of content all of us would unanimously find disturbing speaks for itself.
by oguzhantopcu | 2026-02-03 13:26:28+00:00
YakitOfisi | Senior Full-Stack Software Developer (backend-first) | REMOTE (Turkey)

YakitOfisi (yakıtofisi.com) builds software for the fuel / energy sector.
We’re looking for a senior, backend-first full-stack engineer to own real-world,
deterministic systems that run in production every day.

Tech: .NET, ASP.NET, EF Core, Hangfire, PostgreSQL, Redis, Linux, Nginx, AWS,
Grafana/Loki, Flutter, IoT/serial communication.

Requirements:

- Senior-level, can run a full-stack project independently

- Strong backend (.NET), decent frontend

- Comfortable owning production systems

- Bachelor’s degree required (technopark)

Remote (Turkey, preferably Marmara region).
Salary based on experience.

Apply: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdGsIKBVRaOS0yZu1Rf...
by pjc50 | 2026-02-03 13:26:41+00:00
I call this being "exactly wrong".

I don't know whether it's organically muddled thinking as ideas get repeated and blurred without proper thought or evidence, or whether this in itself is "chaff" to hide things (given the allegations around Epstein and 4chan, maybe there's something to that), or whether it's a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.
by zhshsha | 2026-02-03 13:26:56+00:00
Have you actually used these tools?

My CTO is pushing 30k line PRs and when asked “how do you know it works” all he can say is “I’m not sure but it probably does. Our customers can QA”. Meanwhile I’m cleaning up half vibed messes from my coworkers that demo’d well.

They’re very powerful, but I think their marketing departments are even more powerful. I do wonder how many of these comments are real people.