MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
AI Wrote My Project, an Nginx Engineer Rebuilt the Architecture
by zhidao9 | 2026-02-10 02:52:18+00:00
I've been writing code for over a decade. I work on the nginx team. Recently I had AI (Claude Code + Opus 4.6) write a programmable HTTP benchmarking tool from scratch — C + QuickJS, ~2,000 lines, running in a day. Then I started refactoring its architecture, one commit at a time.

What I learned doesn't match either camp — not "AI will replace us all" nor "it's just hype."

*AI's most dangerous bugs are invisible.* jsbench lets users write JS scripts calling fetch() for load testing. AI wrote the feature and the tests. Report: 16,576 requests, 0 errors. PASS. But every single fetch had failed. The worker thread had no event loop — fetch() couldn't send anything. The code just unconditionally counted each call as success. AI-written code and AI-written tests shared the same blind spot. Not crashes — programs that run fine, pass all tests, and produce wrong results.

*With the right direction, AI is your entire team.* fetch() didn't support concurrency — Promise.all with three requests took 900ms instead of 300ms. AI had implemented "fake async": Promise signature, synchronous blocking inside. I knew the fix: register with a global event loop, return a pending Promise, let the loop drive I/O. I gave AI the problem, the architecture, the existing code, and the constraints. It got it right in one shot — 9 files, 905ms → 302ms. If I'd just said "fetch has a bug," it would've patched around the broken architecture. But a clear direction got a correct structural change.

*Judgment is the real multiplier.* I combined epoll and timers into one "engine" object — one per thread. Simple idea, but 6 files, 20+ call sites. AI changed every one without missing any. If the judgment had been wrong, AI would've applied the mistake just as thoroughly. One architectural call, applied across dozens of files — enormous leverage either way.

*What becomes more valuable:* Architectural judgment — AI implements any direction but won't choose one. Code review — AI produces bugs as fast as code; spotting logic/architecture problems is now a defensive necessity. Domain depth — I knew fetch() needed an event loop because I've written event-driven systems for a decade, not because of a good prompt. AI amplifies abilities you already have; it doesn't create them.

*One line:* In the AI era, technical knowledge isn't for writing code — it's for seeing what's wrong with AI's code. See it, and you have leverage. Miss it, and you're trusting a tool that will confidently tell you everything is fine.

Full series (ongoing): https://github.com/hongzhidao/jsbench/tree/main/docs
by hsuduebc2 | 2026-02-10 02:52:26+00:00
I’d be surprised if this data wasn’t already available through American dominated companies like Meta the same way.

More and more, I’m starting to think this was never really about “privacy” itself. Coming from the US government, it even sounds a bit ironic given the laws that are currently in force. Nothing is truly private in today’s world. And if the article is right, a lot of this data is already brokered and sold online, so China can buy it the same way anyone else can.

So I assume it’s about something that’s harder to sell to the public. For example, giving China a bigger opening to shape public opinion or influence elections, or other national security angles. I’d consider that a real threat too.

And of course ordinary greed helped. For pennies, US tech effectively acquired one of the biggest social platforms on the planet, basically through state pressure.

Heh, who would’ve guessed that the old saying "data is the new oil" would be so... literal.
by nadis | 2026-02-10 02:52:47+00:00
Pretty wild quote from early in the article:

> "Minions are Stripe’s homegrown coding agents. They’re fully unattended and built to one-shot tasks. Over a thousand pull requests merged each week at Stripe are completely minion-produced, and while they’re human-reviewed, they contain no human-written code."

Fully unattended while writing code but with human-reviewed code makes sense, but also seems potentially soulless. I suppose it depends on what they're one-shotting - if it's bug fixes, great. But if it's more creative coding, that might be a bit of a downer for humans who are relegated to reviewing. Curious what others think.
by vunderba | 2026-02-10 02:53:14+00:00
This. I found ACE-Studio 1.5's cover ability to be incredibly lackluster.

What actual musicians want is the ability to send in a unfinished song and then say something like "Add a percussive layer".

Or let me take upload two 4-bar loops (mp3 or MIDI) and then ask an AI-DAW to try to fully arrange them into a ABAB verse-chorus form to experiment with.

As far as I've seen Suno is the ONLY one that you can reliably pass in a 20-30 second melody and get something reasonably interesting and faithful to the original motif.

I've written a couple of articles where I played with transforming some of my existing compositions using AI so you can actually listen to the before and after.

https://mordenstar.com/blog/dutyfree-shop

https://mordenstar.com/blog/screwdriver-sonata
Show HN: K8s controller to sandbox Claude Code (merged 29 PRs to itself)
by gjkim | 2026-02-10 02:53:14+00:00
Hi HN, I'm the author of Axon.

I built this because I wanted to use agentic tools like Claude Code, but I was worried about running claude with --dangerously-skip-permissions on my local machine.

Axon is a Custom Resource Definition (CRD) that spins up ephemeral Pods for every agent task. It creates a safe blast radius.

The Dogfooding: To test it, I used Axon to develop Axon. Over this weekend, I ran agents that read the repo, implemented features/fixes, and opened PRs. I merged 29 of them. It feels like having a team of juniors working in parallel.

The repo is written in Go. I'd love feedback on the controller architecture or the CRD design.
by triceratops | 2026-02-10 02:53:43+00:00
There are multiple credit card companies. They try to attract customers and merchants with promotions and lower fees. Even Paypal has competition.

Companies have cracked the problem of signing up clients and vendors simultaneously in other sectors of the internet economy. This is an annually recurring revenue stream that virtually every adult will spend money on. I'm not super concerned about competition, as long as anti-trust enforcement remains strong.
by ggm | 2026-02-10 02:53:45+00:00
I think like many people I fell in love with the first biography of Burton I read, "the Devil Drives" by Fawn M. Brodie[0] from 1967, which I read in a penguin/allen-lane paperback edition 4 decades ago. I found it well rounded and informing.

The thing is, I enjoyed it so much I've been reluctant to read any more recent work, because I don't particularly NEED my illusions shattered. But I have no doubt more could (and has) been said.

Lord Byron got the soubriquet "mad, bad and dangerous to know" and I think it might have applied to Burton more.

I have often wondered what made Philip Jose Farmer chose him as an eponymous hero in SciFi, and what it says about PJF.

https://archive.org/details/devildriveslifeo0000brod_k9h9
by nextaccountic | 2026-02-10 02:55:05+00:00
We do pattern recognition at an unconscious level all the time. When we perform a task using "system 2" of our mind we are rational and conscious, but when we perform a task using system 1 we do it automatically, intuitively and witu no effort. System 1 often relies on unconscious patterns matching

For example, a chess grandmaster can instinctively tell a good move when seeing a board during a real game. But if they see a random chess board that was not part of a real game, they regress to almost novice level at this task, because there are no patterns to recognize

(patterns such as tactics like pins and skews, or common mating patterns like backrank mate, or common pawn structures and corresponding pawn breaks, things like that - all those patterns can get recognized unconsciously)
by coreyburnsdev | 2026-02-10 02:56:00+00:00
https://dreaming.coreyburns.ca
Built a site for when I need to relax on breaks or when feeling stressed out. Has some relaxing visuals, music and ambient rain noise.

https://waking.coreyburns.ca
Kind of the polar opposite of above, a high energy trance radio station with cool visuals, connected to my local icestream with only banger sets.

https://hackernews.coreyburns.ca
Just my own version of hackernews that is more pleasing to the eye.
by crazygringo | 2026-02-10 02:56:07+00:00
I literally can't tell what the author is arguing against or for.

All the example table images seem fine, and have no captions saying whether they're supposed to be examples of good usage or bad usage.

So either I have no idea what "bad" examples of icon usage are because the author doesn't show any, or the author thinks some or all of them are bad when, to me, the icon+text+color examples seem great (and one figure caption indicates icons+labels are best)?

Yet the author continues to argue against icons and to use text instead? But never says whether icons+labels are actually better than just text, so we should use them in combination?

I'm baffled. For an article arguing for greater clarity, the article itself couldn't be less clear.
by ggm | 2026-02-10 02:56:09+00:00
It's my belief all that could exist is heavily bowdlerised because his wife was a proselytizing christian and burnt his diaries having declared he made a deathbed act of contrition recognising god. I don't think Burton's friends believed it for a moment, apparently she did a trick like cutting a vein to show blood still flowed, claimed she heard him speak and some friendly prelate agreed to the shenanigans in a higher cause. (Burton's abjuration of faith was obviously "political", for the religous fervour of the day)

It beggars belief a man who was into data collecting about prostitution and homosexuality, and who helped publish extensive pornographic works to a cogniscenti married a prude, and came to jesus at the last. But the thing is, he DID marry a prude. And he DID publish works which at the time were beyond the pale, and he DID explore the darker corners of british army life in the middle east and India. The only conjecture here is the deathbed confession of faith.

He wrote memoirs, for sure. "Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Medinah and Meccah" I mean, thats not objective writing by title-intent, is it.
by carshodev | 2026-02-10 02:56:26+00:00
The debt cycle causes short term upward and downward inflation spirals, but overall the inflation is caused by total money supply multiplied by the ratio that the debt is allowed to be compounded to. the ratio is determined by both current regulations regarding loaning practices and the interest rate.

Given that these were constant then then inflation is just a ratio of Productivity(how much things cost) to total money supply (money printing).

So if the government just prints a similar amount of cash relative to the supply as the percentage productivity increase then we get a constant value of for the dollar.

In practice though a small amount of inflation is good in a currency as it encourages spending, if you have deflation this can cause people to speculate on holding cash and not engage in commerce which lowers productivity and thus can cause even more inflation itself.

The real problem is that wages are not growing at the same rate as inflation meaning wealth is being transferred from the working class to the owing class as their businesses get more efficient from the cheapened relative labor costs.
by RupertSalt | 2026-02-10 02:57:35+00:00
Honestly, we could make a case that witch-hunting and persecutions were pro-science.

Witches and "cunning folk" are people who use metaphysical, occult means of spirituality to influence people and the environment. Witchcraft does not appear, to the dispassionate observer, to be scientific, evidence-based, or empirical at all.

Christendom was in the business of supporting many liberal arts and sciences, in terms of architecture, literacy, mathematics, chemistry/alchemy, exploration, R&D and building of war materiels and sea vessels.

It was the witches who were meddling and using occult means, such as divination, augury, psychological manipulation, and treachery to achieve their ends. It was witchcraft that was chaotic and working against orderly scientific inquiries about the natural world.

The witches were typically working clandestinely, stereotypically in a little hut in the woods, in the shadows. The scientists of Christendom were founding and running universities, seminaries, hospitals, and other institutional centers of learning. They were highly organized and orderly endeavors, and witchcraft threatened the natural and political order of things, which seems to be what science represents, even to the present day.
by incrediblylarge | 2026-02-10 02:57:38+00:00
Hi, nice work, its pretty simple and easy to use. I've often found new artists from one-off song collaborations eg Devonte Hynes from Solange's single Losing You. No connection between them is indicated from my minimal use of the site. But that's from the data feed (MusicBrainz) from what I gather, and adding such functionality may increase complexity. Would love to get a quick playlist from all the nodes in a neighbourhood so I could listen quickly. Keen to see where it goes.
by hilbert42 | 2026-02-10 02:57:49+00:00
"By 'repaired' you mean closing a fracture?"

Right, I haven't had many fracture but it was more than I expected. I've had some come apart (completely—shear off). One I recall fixing (replacing the reed) with a piece cut from a phosphor bronze shim several thou thick (I had various thicknesses). Replacing the reed was easy but voicing was a problem because p-bronze has different properties to the original. It was a long while ago so I can't remember exactly what I did but it worked—sort of. I eventually got it roughly in tune but it was a different volume to the others.

About two weeks ago I was up at my old family home for the first time in years and there are two harmoniums dating from the the mid to late 19th C. which I meant to fix years ago. The woodwork on one is particulary ornate and in excellent condition. They both have dead keys when I played them. Reckon I've some wok cut out for me. .
by drzaiusx11 | 2026-02-10 02:58:46+00:00
If anything I'm more 'radical' pushing 50 than I was at 20. That "everyone gets more conservative as you age" adage is not universal.

For me I was 'radicalized' by raising children to adulthood and seeing the broken world we're leaving to them. Living in the US, my eldest daughter has less rights than her mother did growing up. Capitulating to the demands of fascists is not the way to a better future. Complacency has a high cost, regardless of whether it affects you personally.
by adrianwaj | 2026-02-10 02:58:49+00:00
I Gemini'd it for you: https://gemini.google.com/share/fde5515e09ee

Not mentioned was ai.com's superbowl ad and subsequent launch:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/cryptocom-boss-launched-agent...

To build “a decentralized network of autonomous, self-improving AI agents that perform real-world tasks for the good of humanity.”

I am guess that at some point the chat window will somehow tie-in with agents. People will never leave the front page.. it'll say something like: "Would you like me to buy that product for you?" And then some crypto function will come in and handle the finances. I guess that's the power 4:

chat window (inference)

agents (platform)

transaction (blockchain)

superbowl ad (marketing)

Even a dedicated device may eventuate too for the masses. Just disintermediation at work.
by jfengel | 2026-02-10 02:59:32+00:00
The problem for me is when an icon is repeated many times on a page, such as once per row. The word quickly becomes redundant, and the repetition looks ugly. Tables are supposed to be information-dense and wasting screen real estate interferes with the user's task.

I haven't found a good general solution to that. Hover doesn't work on mobile. A legend map is hard to locate. "Expert mode" introduces new problems.

Sometimes I'll just use an unlabeled button and make whatever it is undoable, so that users can just click and discover. But that's hostile to completely new users.
by patcon | 2026-02-10 02:59:36+00:00
gah YES.

I had a slow realization that I could just let people jump in. My goal is to maintain a constant speed and never have to hit the brakes, and I can usually still do that regardless of whether people jump line.

But yes, the principle of it is incredibly aggravating ("that space is for safety, not YOU, green Acura!!!") but I actually kinda like the practice of trying to be zen about it. I mostly get through a long trip at the same rate :)
Show HN: Agents-docs-kits – reusable "docs kits" for AI agents
by thompson0012 | 2026-02-10 02:59:38+00:00
Hi HN — I’m sharing a small open-source repo I started: agents-docs-kits. It’s a collection of reusable documentation “kits” for building and operating AI agents: prompt templates, runbooks/SOPs, checklists, and conventions you can drop into your own agent repos.

Motivation: a lot of agent issues I’ve seen aren’t model problems—they’re missing-process problems (unclear scope, inconsistent tool use, no operational playbook, no shared constraints). The goal here is to make that “boring but critical” layer easy to reuse so each new agent project doesn’t start from scratch.

Repo: https://github.com/thompson0012/agents-docs-kits/tree/main

I’d love feedback on:

What doc artifacts you’ve found most valuable for agents (beyond the prompt itself).

How you structure “agent instructions” / repo-level guidance so it stays maintainable.

PRs with templates: eval checklists, tool-safety policies, incident/runbook patterns, or onboarding docs.

What would you want in a “starter docs kit” if you were spinning up a new agent repo today?
by crazygringo | 2026-02-10 03:01:18+00:00
> The title is misleading. The message is really: Stop using unlabeled icons in data tables.

Except it's not. It's a diatribe against icons period, and then says "When we choose an icon over text..."

But maddeningly, the article never says whether it's advocating text-only, or if icon+text is OK, or if icon+text is worse.

It's horribly unclear.
by topocite | 2026-02-10 03:01:25+00:00
I mean data brokers already do know all this.

I completely agree with you in spirit but I just can't imagine in 25 years, people won't be wearing spacial computing AR glasses with face recognition and all this is going to be out in the open.

If we were not going to evolve into a total surveillance state we wouldn't be at the state we are now.

We need to learn this lesson from 1984
"Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."
by munificent | 2026-02-10 03:01:30+00:00
I'm familiar with "steamer clams", but not "clam steamers".

In "shrimp fried rice", "shrimp" is a noun adjunct [1], which is when you use a noun as an adjective.

The charming ambiguity comes from it being unclear whether "shrimp" is an adjunct noun modifying "fried rice" ("shrimp fried-rice") or modifying the past participle verb "fried" ("shrimp-fried rice").

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headline#Headlinese
by tom_ | 2026-02-10 03:02:04+00:00
If you got rid of the slider entirely and just had it flick between the two images instantly, the entire handle business would become irrelevant, and you'd never need to think about it again!

I admit I don't do web stuff, so perhaps this is hard to do. But I think it's the ideal. Before/after comparisons are very easy to assess if you can flick between the two cases and let your eyes show you the differences. The value of having an image that's part one and part the other (and two completely separate parts!) seems a bit questionable.

(My line of work means I'm unlikely to end up a customer, so you don't have to pay attention to my opinions.)
by garciansmith | 2026-02-10 03:02:15+00:00
I would agree that many people view the Middle Ages as a static time, though a point I was trying to make was that the "Dark Ages" can mean different things depending on the person and context.

But more importantly it wasn't static (or "almost entirely stopped")! It's an erroneous conception that, as I said, started with people who lived in the Middle Ages. People in the Renaissance and Early Modern Period would often repeat this, so now many people do too. That doesn't make it correct.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-02-10 03:02:32+00:00
Think of it this way, Sodium metal is abundant and cheap with 30x the energy storage (and energy transfer) of other solutions yet nobody has used it in almost any product ever (including as a coolant).

Huh? See https://www.terrapower.com/natrium/ -- and it's not exactly a new idea.

Also not uncommon to use sodium-filled exhaust valves in car, motorcycle, and aircraft engines.
by RupertSalt | 2026-02-10 03:02:50+00:00
Woah, like, "green Acura"? Where are you driving that you ever see one of those? In the USA?

I looked up an image catalog, and it seems that if an Acura's going to be green, it is likely to be an NS-X, which are fairly exotic as Acuras go.

I owned a black Integra for a while. If any had been green in those days, I would've definitely noticed! And, I definitely would've yielded the right-of-way to them, just so I could gawk and stare!
by tiny-automates | 2026-02-10 03:02:59+00:00
that's the user-facing definition but the implementation distinction matters more.

"takes longer than you're willing to wait" describes the UX, not the architecture. the engineering question is: does the system actually free up the caller's compute/context to do other work, or is it just hiding a spinner?

nost agent frameworks i've worked with are the latter - the orchestrator is still holding the full conversation context in memory, burning tokens on keep-alive, and can't actually multiplex. real async means the agent's state gets serialized, the caller reclaims its resources, and resumption happens via event - same as the difference between setTimeout with a polling loop vs. actual async/await with an event loop.
by BobbyTables2 | 2026-02-10 03:03:05+00:00
It’s a lot like the “how shit happens tale”.

The product may take 20 minute to boot - a testament to its complexity and greatness (/s). But pointing that out might end badly when it’s the SVP’s pet. They will not entertain alternatives or efforts that distract from their mental plan.

And if a developer finds themselves getting feedback or communication from customers, things are probably on fire - absolutely literally.
by porknubbins | 2026-02-10 03:03:24+00:00
I came across Burton on forum discussions of polyglots. In addition to the above he is supposed to have been fluent in some impossible number of languages like 50. Of course no one was around to check and many of these could have been dialects or much smaller languages than the major world languages.

Another great Victorian translator was Arthur Waley who translated the Tale of Genji and lots of Chinese poetry without ever having visted Asia. Its absolutely mind boggling to me, having barely learned a few languages how one would tranlate from handwritten kanji scrolls with no reference materials or even bilingual dictionaries.