MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dinesh_gdk | 2026-02-10 07:18:01+00:00
I conducted a benchmark comparing GCC against Claude’s C Compiler (CCC), an AI-generated compiler created by Claude Opus 4.6. Using a non-trivial Turing machine simulator as our test program, I evaluated correctness, execution performance, microarchitectural efficiency, and assembly code quality.

Key Findings:

100% Correctness: CCC produces functionally identical output across all test cases

2.76x Performance Gap: CCC-compiled binaries run slower than GCC -O2 but 12% faster than GCC -O0

3.3x Instruction Overhead: CCC generates significantly more instructions due to limited optimization

Surprisingly High IPC: Despite verbosity, CCC achieves 4.89 instructions per cycle vs GCC’s 4.13
by pbowyer | 2026-02-10 07:18:01+00:00
Hi @tabbott I've been meaning to pass this feedback on for 5 months, and I hope it comes across in the spirit it's meant.

I tried Zulip (cloud offering) with some techie/designery friends, so we should have been right at home but... the desktop app on macOS and the web app was visually unappealing and clunky, and we ended up going back to a paid Slack plan.

I looked for docs on how to theme Zulip (so I could contribute), or for existing theme packs that would soften the transition but found neither.

tl;dr: The functionality was good (Love the threading!) but the UI feels like the 2000s came calling. Some UI polish would go a long way.
by skydhash | 2026-02-10 07:18:31+00:00
Ok, I’ll bite. What’s there to learn that you can tie directly to an increase of productivity?

I can say “learn how to use vim makeprg feature so that you can jump directly to errors reported by the build and tool” and it’s very clear where the ROI. But all the AI hypers are selling are hope, prayers, and rituals.
by lvndry | 2026-02-10 07:19:05+00:00
Jazz (https://github.com/lvndry/jazz): A resourceful CLI assistant that actually does things. It uses a hierarchy of dedicated tools, system commands, and "Skills" to manage everything from your Git history and local files to your calendar and inbox. Built for speed, safety, and system-level resourcefulness.

Clausea (http://clausea.co/ - https://github.com/lvndry/clausea): Terms of services were not written for you...until now. Clausea makes it easier to understand and see the risks of the terms and policies of the products you use the most
by RupertSalt | 2026-02-10 07:19:14+00:00
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
by girvo | 2026-02-10 07:19:36+00:00
Yeah I’m baffled why people are surprised that senior+ engineers who are being told in one breath they will be replaced by this tool and also they MUST use this tool to make it better to replace them aren’t happy about it or want to use it willingly.

I also find it wild how we’re sleepwalking into this, but I’m also part of the problem and using these things too.
by js2 | 2026-02-10 07:20:41+00:00
If I have to take the clock off the wall and move it outside, I may as well set it by hand. In any case, I've tried leaving one outside facing west and it still doesn't work. I've literally never had one of these clocks work from NC.

Meanwhile, the WiFi NTP clock I purchased just works, like I always hoped the WWVB clocks would have.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46948343
by czhu12 | 2026-02-10 07:20:55+00:00
I’ve been slowing building https://canine.sh for about two years now.

It’s a basically a full Heroku replacement, with a UI, CLI, etc, except running with a Kubernetes backend.

It’s fully open source. It was super annoying how delightful Heroku was, but how annoyingly locked-in and expensive it is.

I’ve been lucky to get a sponsorship from the Portainer folks so I can work on this full time!
by sarchertech | 2026-02-10 07:20:59+00:00
> It's a data point but this weekend (e.g. in 2 days) I build a desktop + web agent that is able to help me reason on system design and code. Built with Codex powered by the Codex SDK. It is high quality. I've been a software engineer and director of engineering for 10 years. I'm blown away.

Assuming you’re not a bot. It’s nothing to do with you having a good experience, it’s the way you wrote about that experience that sounds like a product placement.

I asked OpenAIs very own ChatGPT 5.2 powered by OpenAI to tell you why it sounds like a product placement:

“ Because it hits a bunch of “native ad / testimonial” tells at once:
• Brand-name density in a tiny space. “Built with Codex powered by the Codex SDK” repeats the same brand in two adjacent phrases, like copy that’s trying to lodge a name in your head rather than naturally describe a build.
• Overly polished value signals. “High quality” is a generic superlative with no concrete evidence (features, metrics, constraints, tradeoffs). Ads often lean on verdict words instead of specifics.
• Credential + astonishment combo. “I’ve been a software engineer and director of engineering for 10 years” is classic authority framing, immediately followed by “I’m blown away.” That’s a common testimonial structure: I’m hard to impress → I’m impressed.
• Time-compressed “miracle build” narrative. “This weekend (in 2 days) I build a desktop + web agent…” reads like the “you can do it fast/easily now” story arc you see in promos. Not impossible—just a familiar marketing shape.
• “It’s a data point” language. That phrase feels like social-proof seeding: “don’t treat this as hype, just one datapoint,” which paradoxically makes it feel more like deliberate persuasion.
• No friction or downsides. Real engineer excitement usually includes at least one caveat (bugs, rough edges, limitations, cost, setup pain). The total absence makes it sound curated.
• Benefit phrased like positioning. “Able to help me reason on system design and code” is basically a product pitch line (target user + problem + outcome) rather than a personal anecdote (“it helped me untangle X design and refactor Y”).”
by carshodev | 2026-02-10 07:22:36+00:00
This makes it non social media, the reason I post on social media is to ALLOW the world to view what I speak about. I don't mind if my data is harvested or trained off of.

Posting with encrypted data makes no sense as you are disrupting the social network with worthless garbage for 99.999% instead it would just be better to have an RSS type feed that your consumers (friends) can subscribe to and it shows the comment you made and the link to what you commented on.

Or if you just want to say something about it to 1 friend just send it to them.

You could still have pub/priv keys and an autodecrypt system though or use traditional authentication for allowing content pulls.
Show HN: Konform Browser v140.7.0-108
by konform | 2026-02-10 07:22:50+00:00
Konform Browser is a Firefox ESR fork focused on security, privacy, and user freedom. This might sound familiar but I think we still have something worthwhile to bring to the browser ecosystem.

The project started as a fork of LibreWolf and now stands on its own four feet. It takes a harder stance on the three goals of security, privacy and freedom. It's intended to be suitable as a general-purpose daily driver for everything from managing the intranet to surfing the murkier tubes.

This week we added a simple "onboarding" page replacing the about:welcome of Firefox with a page where the user can choose between four different preset configs depending on their scenario and preferences.

If you don't enjoy compiling browser from source, there are prepackaged binaries and probably repos for your Linux dist.

Doors open for users, testers, contributors, as well as hackers itching to (constructively and helpfully pretty please) tear this apart. Looking forward to hear what HN thinks!
by baq | 2026-02-10 07:23:30+00:00
> 4. Expertise loss

> A lot of positive outcomes with LLMs come from being already experienced. Some argue this will be eroded - both for new devs and existing experienced devs.

This is true, but the pace of progress is so mind blowing the experts we have now might just be enough until the whole industry becomes obsolete (10-20 years assuming the lower bound of the trend line holds?)
by xyzsparetimexyz | 2026-02-10 07:24:25+00:00
> Pay through the nose for Opus or GPT-7.9-xhigh-with-cheese. Don't worry, it's only for a few years.

> You have to turn off the sandbox, which means you have to provide your own sandbox. I have tried just about everything and I highly recommend: use a fresh VM.

> I am extremely out of touch with anti-LLM arguments

'Just pay out the arse and run models without a sandbox or in some annoying VM just to see them fail. Wait, some people are against this?'
by Dylan16807 | 2026-02-10 07:26:21+00:00
What you said there is all true, but largely because you didn't mention efficiency. If your heat source is a lot hotter than the steam you make, you do lose a lot of efficiency. If you had a million degree heat source, you could have many steps extracting huge amounts of power before your "waste" heat gets down to 1000C and is used to boil water.

The part about bad conduction being a problem is nonsense. The "lucky to get 1% efficiency" is not nonsense.
by MattJ100 | 2026-02-10 07:26:26+00:00
Of these, (1) and (2) are already implemented in XMPP.

(1) just isn't that widely deployed due to low DNSSEC adoption and setup complexity, but there is a push to get server operators to use it if they can.

(2) is defined in RFC 7711: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7711 however it has more latency and complexity compared to just using a valid certificate directly in the XMPP connection's TLS handshake. Its main use is for XMPP hosting providers that don't have access to a domain's HTTPS.
by dmos62 | 2026-02-10 07:26:33+00:00
Curious what kind of agent did you build? I'm building a programming agent myself, it's intentionally archaic in that you run it by constantly copy-pasting from-to fresh ChatGPT sessions (: I'm finding it challenging to have it do good context management: I'm trying to solve this by declaring parts of code or spec as "collections" with an overview md file attached that acts like a map of why/where/what, but that can't scale indefinitely.
by aortega | 2026-02-10 07:26:37+00:00
I'm releasing the first (and likely last) version of my AI trained on Epstein Emails. Surprisingly hard to do, as most LLMs will refuse to generate the dataset for Epstein, lol. Everything about this is local, the dataset generation, training, etc. Done in a 16GB RTX-5000 ADA.

Anyway, it's based on Qwen3-8B and its quite funny. GGUF available at link.
Also I have it online here if you dare: https://www.neuroengine.ai/Neuroengine-MechaEpstein

And we are discussing it at /r/LocalLLaMA here: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1r0eo44/mechaep...
by igotdiscord2015 | 2026-02-10 07:26:50+00:00
Actually, the true killer feature for discord back in the day was something much dumber, but still heavily related to on-boarding and community transference.

You could join a discord server with a single link.

Account creation could come later.

Considering the competition at its heyday was Teamspeak or Skype, the mere fact you could just actually see the hell you were getting into without some stupid ass "Hol' Up!" instantly made it popular with basically everyone who didn't even know what it was.

My account is dated June 2015 which is apparently a month after it launched, and both me and every single one of the early adopters in that channel that is still up to this day have this same story to tell. We used it because we didn't even have to login at all in the first place when we first got it.
by RupertSalt | 2026-02-10 07:26:58+00:00
That isn't true.

Necromancy and divination are practices depicted in the Old Testament. Everyone knows they are real, and dangerous.

The fact of practicing occultism or magic is that it may work by summoning/manipulating evil forces. That it may work by messing with things beyond human control and authority.

The Abrahamic religions uniformly forbid superstitions, occultism, witchcraft and all kinds of magic, not because they "are impossible" but because they're uncontrollable and dangerous, for anyone, anytime.
Show HN: Claude Meter – macOS menu bar app to track your Claude Code usage limit
by aliyilmaz-co | 2026-02-10 07:29:45+00:00
Hey HN! I built a native macOS menu bar app that shows your Claude Code usage limits at a glance — no more getting rate-limited mid-flow.

It reads your OAuth token from macOS Keychain, polls the Anthropic usage API, and displays your 5-hour and 7-day utilization as a clean progress bar right in your menu bar. Zero token consumption.

Built with Swift + SwiftUI. MIT licensed.

https://github.com/puq-ai/claude-meter
by kmansm27 | 2026-02-10 07:30:43+00:00
An example of a non-coding "asynchronous agent" in my mind is something like deep research. It runs for a while in ChatGPT or Gemini, and when it's done, it produces a markdown file or google doc with its findings. The parallel with your definition of "asynchronous coding agent" is that I'm not watching it work or involved in the process.

But your last point highlights exactly why the sync/async distinction doesn't hold up as a binary classification. Even with deep research, I go back and forth on a plan synchronously before sending it off to run async. Any good asynchronous coding agent should work the same way.
by verisimi | 2026-02-10 07:30:56+00:00
While I understand applying legal constraints according to jurisdiction, why is it auto-accepted that some party (who?) can determine ethical concerns? On what basis?

There are such things as different religions, philosophies - these often have different ethical systems.

Who are the folk writing ai ethics?

It's it ok to disagree with other people's (or corporate, or governmental) ethics?
by oguz-ismail2 | 2026-02-10 07:31:02+00:00
Nit pick, but

>FILE* f = fopen(path, "rb");

>...

>if (fseek(f, 0, SEEK_END) != 0) return option_charp_none();

>long len = ftell(f);

does ISO C guarantee this'll work these days? How come there's no fread+realloc fallback?
by iterance | 2026-02-10 07:31:04+00:00
My critique is not due to pessimism, it is due to afactuality. Breakthroughs in science are plenty in the modern era and there is no reason to expect them to slow or halt.

However, from your later comments, it sounds as though you feel the only operating definition of a "breakthrough" is a change inducing a rapid rise in labor extraction / conventional productivity. I could not disagree more strongly with this opinion, as I find this definition utterly defies intuition. It rejects many, if not most, changes in scientific understanding that do not directly induce a discontinuty in labor extraction. But admittedly if one restricts the definition of a breakthrough in this way, then, well, you're probably about right. (Though I don't see what Mars has to do with labor extraction.)
by somenameforme | 2026-02-10 07:31:32+00:00
You're creating a false dichotomy since there's always the obvious option of sustainability which is a fertility rate of around 2.1. And declining populations will likely create a far less sustainable world than increasing would. I described in a peer thread how fertility rates directly lead to the age ratios in society. Low fertility rates means you're going to have a low number of working age people for a large number of elderly people. On top of this, positive fertility rates mean that economies naturally increase in size even if you do absolutely nothing - negative growth rates mean that economies will naturally shrink.

We're nowhere even remotely near our production capacity for food, water, or energy - but we're already facing labor issues in achieving such. And in a low-growth future, which is our future, these labor issues will magnify exponentially. And it's not like you can just pay people more and everybody lives happily ever after - there simply won't be enough people to do everything that needs to be done, even if everybody's willing to work themselves to death. The expectations for what a society can provide will begin to unravel.

And I see no reason not to go sci-fi here because there's every reason to believe it's our future. Earth will not be humanity's only domain. It's practically inconceivable that we won't have thriving off-planet civilizations within a century and realistically - far sooner. And a century of unsustainable growth would be vastly less damaging to society than a century of unsustainable decline.
by fatbird | 2026-02-10 07:32:18+00:00
This is a common framing of the Copernican revolution, and it's wrong.

Copernicus was proposing circular orbits with the sun at the center instead of the earth. The Copernican model required more epicycles for accurate predictions than the considerably well-proven Ptolemaic model did, with the earth at the centre.

It wasn't until Kepler came along and proposed elliptical orbits that a heliocentric solar system was obviously a genuine advance on the model, both simpler and more accurate.

There was no taboo being preserved by rejecting Copernicus's model. The thinkers of the day rightfully saw a conceptual shift with no apparent advantage and several additional costs.
by baq | 2026-02-10 07:32:35+00:00
I’m not an AI hyper, I just don’t code manually anymore. Tickets take about as much time to close as before, but the code shipped now has higher test coverage, higher performance, better concurrency error handling, less follow-up refactor PRs, less escapes to staging/prod and better documentation; some of it is now also modeled in a model checker.
by throwup238 | 2026-02-10 07:33:17+00:00
As far as I know that’s the law in every state I’ve driven in, but enforcement is pretty much nonexistent. Some states like Texas or Louisiana might have signs reminding people to stay out of the inner lanes except for passing but I’ve never heard of anyone getting a ticket over it. What’s enforcement like in the UK?

For example, the specific law in California: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
by yellowapple | 2026-02-10 07:33:49+00:00
> Anyway this thing [Revolt/Stoat] is so far from being ready for prime time, I only include it here to call out the project. I wish them the best and hope for good things, especially since you can self-host the server. But a lack of stability and features prevent this from being useful for anything beyond experimentation. Maybe someday.

Curious what prompted this verdict. My only experience with Revolt/Stoat has been with the Handmade Cities instance, but said experience hasn't been anywhere near as bad as this writeup seems to suggest.
by aurareturn | 2026-02-10 07:35:13+00:00
It’s not really a secret that Singapore uses ethnicity based quotas when granting PR and citizenship to maintain their demographic composition.

Or be like Malaysia. They don't even bother to keep it a secret to maintain Malay governing power and unfair advantage.

Cheaper gas only for Muslim citizens, not Chinese/Indian citizens. A company must hire Malay Muslim no matter what. Plenty of other rules that favor an ethnicity.
by ge0rg | 2026-02-10 07:35:24+00:00
Let's Encrypt also provides value by providing signed TLS certificates that are enrolled in all major operating systems, and that can be used to authenticate any TLS server.

This is a significant and important use case that's totally ignored by the "WebPKI" proponents, and there is no alternative infrastructure that would provide that value if WebPKI would e.g. decide to add certificate constraints limiting issued certificates to TCP/433.
by mmsc | 2026-02-10 07:35:33+00:00
No. HTTPS certificates are being abused for non-https purposes. CAs want to sell certificates for everything under the sun, and want to force those in the ecosystem to support their business, even though https certificates are not designed to be used for other things (mail servers for example).

If CAs don't want hostility from browser companies for using https certificate for non-http/browser applications, they should build their own thing.
by safety1st | 2026-02-10 07:35:33+00:00
In order to make sure businesses aren't giving porn to teens, you can require they do meaningful age verification at the time they want to provide the porn. You can impose criminal penalties on a domestic business which doesn't do this, and other penalties on foreign businesses (such as locking them out of the payments network). You don't need to get 100%, even partial success will act as a deterrent. This is how the world worked before the Internet, you needed to show ID to buy porn, and public opinion is in favor of the world working this way again. Crucially, penalties on businesses (not consumers, and starting with the biggest ones) are the way you need to go because this is the only way this can feasibly be enforced.

The libertarian concerns around privacy, freedom of expression and surveillance are all valid, but they're downstream. We have hard evidence that porn damages sexual health and relationships, and it has basically zero value to society; it's like digital cigarettes in this sense. We can't allow ourselves to be paralyzed on this issues because of a theoretical slippery slope. Whether Discord is going about this the right way is open for debate, and whether legislation solves the porn problem without introducing surveillance risks is also a good discussion to have. But the porn as well as the fraud and exploitation which always seem to accompany that industry need to go. Libertarians would be wise not to conflate the endorsement of privacy with an endorsement of porn -- most people support the former to some degree, but when people come forward with enthusiastic support for the latter, more often than not their motivation is addiction or profit, not a crowd the defenders of privacy want to be lumped in with.
by littlestymaar | 2026-02-10 07:35:45+00:00
> Credit scores are universally hated but they make it possible to offer lower interest rates to more people.

That's probably true in theory, but not in practice, given how high US credit interest rates are compared to European countries for instance.

> Without credit scores, fewer people would have access to credit.

Too many people having access to credit is exactly how we got the worst financial crisis of the century, so it's not really something to brag about… People talk about US public debt a lot, but private debt is even more worrisome.
by kbenson | 2026-02-10 07:35:50+00:00
You say don't use databases, and that we had the option to use something different and did not, and chose this path.

I ask you what to use instead, and how to deal with datastore versioning.

You say you're talking about how we don't have type safety that extends to the remote systems we're interacting with.

I ask how that helps versioning problems with these systems where you need to deal with applying changes across distributes systems, which specifically is not solved by having types in lockstep definition between systems, because in application of change there are problems to work thought.

You note we did all this deliberately and we didn't have to. I keep asking you what the other option is, because you keep acting like there is one, but refusing to give an example of what that would be, because a monorepo is no solution for the problems being discussed here in the article, which to be clear, are not limited to code.

You've made it very clear you think we should have done "something" else, but refuse to articulate what that is. If it's not known, or not explored, then I posit we didn't "choose" this path, it's the path that was open to us.

> You’re discussing how to live in the house after the foundation cracked.

You keep saying we should have used something else for the foundation that wouldn't crack, but refuse to explain what this mythical material is.

What is your proposed alternative, or are you just waxing theoretical?