MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by iainmerrick | 2026-02-25 10:02:38+00:00
Yes! After seeing a lot of discussions like this, I came up with a rule of thumb:

Any special accommodations you make for LLMs are either a) also good for humans, or b) more trouble than they're worth.

It would be nice for both LLMs and humans to have a tool that hides verbose tool output, but still lets you go back and inspect it if there's a problem. Although in practice as a human I just minimise the terminal and ignore the spam until it finishes. Maybe LLMs just need their own equivalent of that, rather than always being hooked up directly to the stdout firehose.
by kzahel | 2026-02-25 10:02:42+00:00
I left some notes about this. I agree with you directionally but practically/economically you want to let users leverage what they're already paying for.

https://yepanywhere.com/subscription-access-approaches/

Captures the ai-sdk and pi-mono.

In an ideal world we would have a pi-cli-mono or similar, like something that is not as powerful as pi but gives a least common denominator sort of interface to access at least claude/codex.

ACP is also something interesting in this space, though I don't honestly know how that fits into this story.
Show HN: A real-time strategy game that AI agents can play
by __cayenne__ | 2026-02-25 10:02:45+00:00
I've liked all the projects that put LLMs into game environments. It's been a weird juxtaposition, though: frontier LLMs can one-shot full coding projects, and those same models struggle to get out of Pokémon Red's Mt. Moon.

Because of this, I wanted to create a game environment that put this generation of frontier LLMs' top skill, coding, on full display.

Ten years ago, a team released a game called Screeps. It was described as an "MMO RTS sandbox for programmers." The Screeps paradigm of writing code and having it executed in a real-time game environment is well suited to LLMs. Drawing on a version of the Screeps open source API, LLM Skirmish pits LLMs head-to-head in a series of 1v1 real-time strategy games.

In my testing I found that Claude Opus 4.5 was the most dominant model, but it showed weakness in round 1 as it was overly focused on its in-game economy. Meanwhile, I probably spent a third of all code on sandbox hardening because GPT 5.2 kept trying to cheat by pre-reading its opponent's strategies.

If there's interest, I'm planning on doing a round of testing with the latest generation of LLMs (Claude 4.6 Opus, GPT 5.3 Codex, etc.).

You can run local matches via CLI. I'm running a hosted match runner with Google Cloud Run that uses isolated-vm. The match playback visualizer is statically served from Cloudflare.

I've created a community ladder that you can submit strategies to via CLI, no auth required. I've found that the CLI plus the skill.md that's available has been enough for AI agents to immediately get started.

Website: https://llmskirmish.com

API docs: https://llmskirmish.com/docs

GitHub: https://github.com/llmskirmish/skirmish

A video of a match: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnBPaZ1qamM
by 5o1ecist | 2026-02-25 10:03:09+00:00
> to me

Your "to me" is actually problematic, because it legitimizes this nonsensical idea and turns words and their meaning into something purely individualistic, which cannot end well for the current, but even more so for the next generation.

I can confirm that "boiling water" definitively is "water that's boiling" and that words, which are supposedly two words, definitely are not one word.
by ochronus | 2026-02-25 10:03:29+00:00
This discussion feels analogous to me to the age-old "we can do it fast now, and do it right later" tradeoff discussion, except now it's about knowledge, maintainability etc.. There are stages of companies and types of products where solution quality has a bigger buffer, some are more critical. We also know that in many places, once you shipped a crappy solution in a week, you've now set an expectation, and management will expect you do repeat that forever, not getting the time to actually fix/rearchitect when needed.

We used to brush that off with the "we'll fix all of that once we've shipped", now we brush it off with "doesn't matter, AI can fix it later easily". This applies to knowledge about the code, domains and quality itself, too.

To me, this is a reasonable tradeoff to discuss, and sticking to either extreme ("AI is cancer" and "AI is the silver bullet") feels silly.

There's real risk here, and I do see a lot of seniors act like kids in the candy store. That speaks volumes to what AI really unlocks (cheap experimentation, for one!), but also warrants caution.

Based on the data (not great quality tbh...) we have, the net speedup is more realistically around 5-10% of the total time of software engineers, and we're yet to see the cost of that speedup.
by jongjong | 2026-02-25 10:03:37+00:00
I cannot comprehend why there are so few companies dominating the payments sector. It doesn't seem competitive. Anyone can build a payment processor, nobody can get regulatory approval.

I also don't understand the fear around SaaS recently... People believe some weird narrative about AI replacing SaaS apps... Oh boy, people actually think that building the thing is the hard part. The entire software industry is pure crony-play; the people who run the big corporations own shares of their SaaS providers so they have no incentive to cut those contracts. Same with payment processors. I can't believe people still think we have a free market.

You can point to any company that's successful and there will be conflicts of interest all over the place. It doesn't even matter what the company does TBH. It's irrelevant.

People are just competing on who can make the money move around in circles within their group the fastest. Money certainly seems a lot more abundant when it passes through many hands and people are just buying stuff from each other.
by richardfeynman | 2026-02-25 10:03:40+00:00
Qassam rockets are not "useless." They've killed multiple people, including kids. They are relatively low-yield compared to later Grad/Fajr/M-75 type rockets Hamas used, but to say they're "useless" is a huge overstatement, and the implication that they represented Hamas's entire arsenal is wrong.

The reality is that Hamas also had dozens if not hundreds of R-160 / M-302 medium range rockets (up to 200km) and long range Ayyash 250 rocekts (travel more than 200km).

In addition to the direct devastation the rockets cause, they also force large swaths of the Israeli population into bomb shelters, which has other military benefits for Hamas. It was part of the 10/7 strategy they employed.

People like to pretend Hamas was a tiny force. The reality is what I said: it was larger than many European militaries, with an arsenal to match.
by m0rde | 2026-02-25 10:03:41+00:00
I think about what I do in these verbose situations; I learn to ignore most of the output and only take forward the important piece. That may be a success message or error. I've removed most of the output from my context window / memory.

I see some good research being done on how to allow LLMs to manage their own context. Most importantly, to remove things from their context but still allow subsequent search/retrieval.
Show HN: Frouter – Live-ping and auto-configure free AI models for coding agents
by jyoung105 | 2026-02-25 10:03:54+00:00
Free models on NVIDIA NIM and OpenRouter now hit S-tier on SWE-bench Verified (60%+), but availability is a coin flip. Models get rate-limited, go dark, or spike to 5s+ latency with no notice. I was editing JSON configs by hand every time one died mid-session.
frouter is a terminal TUI that pings all free models in parallel every 2 seconds and shows live latency, uptime, and health. You pick one, it writes the config for OpenCode or OpenClaw and launches it. When a model dies, you switch in seconds instead of minutes.
How ranking works: models are sorted by availability first, then SWE-bench tier (S+ through C), then rolling average latency. Arena Elo is shown as a secondary signal. All ranking data is bundled and updated with releases; latency and uptime are measured live per session.
Some specifics:

Pings are real completion requests, not just health checks
Vim-style keybinds, tier filtering (T to cycle S+ → C), search with /
frouter --best prints the best model ID to stdout for scripting/CI
First-run wizard handles API keys, configs backed up before overwrite
Two providers currently: NVIDIA NIM (nvapi- keys) and OpenRouter (sk-or- keys), both free tier

Install and run:
npx frouter-cli
MIT licensed, TypeScript, 59 commits. Would appreciate feedback on model coverage, provider support, or ranking methodology — especially if you're using free models for agentic coding and have opinions on what's missing.
https://github.com/jyoung105/frouter
by nananana9 | 2026-02-25 10:04:25+00:00
Don't fall for the "JS ecosystem" trap and use sane tools. If a floobergloob requires you to add a floobergloob.config.js to your project root that's a very good indicator floobergloob is not worth your time.

The only boilerplate files you need in a JS repo root are gitignore, package.json, package-lock.json and optionally tsconfig if you're using TS.

A node.js project shouldn't require a build step, and most websites can get away with a single build.js that calls your bundler (esbuild) and copies some static files dist/.
by octoclaw | 2026-02-25 10:04:48+00:00
The fact that they found three independent paths to Turing completeness is what makes this paper fun. Even removing regex back-references doesn't kill it.

At some point you start wondering if there's any tool with conditionals and some form of persistent state that ISN'T Turing complete. The bar seems way lower than most people assume. Reminds me of the mov-is-Turing-complete result from a few years back.
by mihaaly | 2026-02-25 10:04:56+00:00
"Designing a system to incentivize sellers to have their lowest prices on Amazon..." so that vendors like the above person getting "the systemic effect that in order for the sellers to get their *sweet purchase orders from Amazon, they now need to raise prices elsewhere" IS intentional!

'Designing a sytem' to 'raise prices elsewhere'!

Probably the person's intent was to protect Amazon, but in my eye this is just providing a very strong real evidence against them now.
by rzk | 2026-02-25 10:05:07+00:00
Here is the data since the beginning of HN, where a new submitter is defined as a user whose account was created less than three months before the submission:

Stories: https://pastebin.com/Zc4jXvp4

Comments: https://pastebin.com/cFuczTWJ

The number of new submitters has indeed increased significantly since the beginning of 2026.
by mathan_karthik | 2026-02-25 10:05:18+00:00
I'm building a personal finance tracker for Indian users and thinking about adding a feature where users can share their UPI payment receipts (screenshots from PhonePe, GPay, Paytm, etc.) directly into the app.

How it would work:

After a UPI payment, the user shares the receipt screenshot to the app
The app parses the receipt (OCR/image parsing) to extract amount, merchant, and date
It automatically creates a spending entry
If the merchant is unrecognized, on next login the user is prompted to categorize it
Once mapped, future payments to the same merchant are auto-categorized
Why receipts instead of email/SMS parsing:

UPI apps (PhonePe, GPay, Paytm) all have a "Share" button on every receipt
No need for SMS permissions or email forwarding setup
Works cross-platform — the receipt format is consistent enough for OCR
Less privacy-invasive than reading SMS or email
My questions for HN:

Would you use this? Is the friction of "share receipt" low enough?
Any existing apps doing this well (India or globally)?
Is OCR reliable enough for this, or is there a better parsing approach?
by stevekemp | 2026-02-25 10:05:28+00:00
I think the people who complained about paypal stopped using it.

Back in the day I had a paypal account, as did many friends, solely because it was the only supported payment method on Ebay.

After a few bad experiences I cancelled/closed my paypal account, and I know I'm not alone in that.

These days the sight of a paypal payment form is an immediate tab-close. I've no wish to use them, support them, or go near them ever again.
by penetrarthur | 2026-02-25 10:05:30+00:00
There were not a whole lot of Russian tourists 10 years ago because the memories from Russian invasion of 2008 were still fresh.

I'm not saying that inflow of Russians is particularly bad, it just raised the prices of everything very significantly, and together with the pro-Russian government and reversal in pro-European development, the European tourist influx is stagnant at best.
by polyglotfacto | 2026-02-25 10:05:34+00:00
I am a maintainer of the Servo web engine. Two years ago, our project banned AI-generated contributions. I was a dissenting voice on that policy, and have continued to experiment with AI on side-projects. This is perhaps the most ambitious side-project so far: implementing the WebNN (Neural Network) API.

Given the policy in place, I'm doing this on a personal branch of Servo. I’m using it as a sandbox to test a specific thesis: AI is not an architect; it is a "fluid syntax engine."

This is also my response to the "autonomous slop" seen in projects like fastrender that claim to build complex software with AI but produce what I call "fine-looking nonsense" (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624541#46709191). I wanted to see if a human architect could use an AI agent to handle the syntax and boilerplate of a Web Standard while the human retains total control over the conceptual structure.

Progress & Tech Stack:

The scope: I am using `rustnn`, and this project can be seen as doing for the Web what `pywebnn` does for Python.

The model: I am intentionally using a "cheap" LLM: Raptor mini.

The scale: I’m 7k LOC into the implementation. It currently passes a subset of WPT (Web Platform Tests) conformance tests for a specific operator (and its dependencies): add. Such a conformance test requires implementing the full graph compilation and dispatch workflow. Code is at https://github.com/gterzian/servo/compare/master...gterzian:servo:webnn

The backend: The work involves integrating the `rustnn` library into Servo’s runtime, with compute currently happening only via CoreML (macOS only).

The Reality Check:
While the productivity boost is real, the code is not yet up to my standards. Despite ongoing reviews, I’ve had to accept a certain amount of "slop" that I’ll need to clean up later. More importantly, I hit several conceptual bottlenecks: architectural problems the AI was not only unable to solve without guidance but was unable to even identify in the first place.

You can read the full breakdown of the first week and a half (contains links to code and various illustrative commits) in the link for this post.

And the backstory on why I'm doing this is at: https://medium.com/@polyglot_factotum/the-slop-diaries-imple...

I’d be happy to hear from others on how they balance the "syntax speed" of AI with the "architectural integrity" required for long-term projects.
by akoboldfrying | 2026-02-25 10:05:47+00:00
Thanks for responding thoughtfully. I think we agree that the point of limited copyright is to encourage creation of works. I would say that creating and selling the works is already a substantial benefit to the public who opt to buy or license them (and in the case of physical copies at least, resell or swap them). I see only a moderate social value in forcing them to eventually become public domain (I have never waited with bated breath for a particular text to be added to Project Gutenberg), but I'm certainly not opposed to such limits.

> The best way to preserve works is to spread them far and wide.

I disagree. We are in an age of cheap and abundant digital storage; preserving works for the public good could be adequately covered by introducing a requirement that copyright holders archive their digital works in a government archive, to be unlocked when copyright expires. (Due to the extreme time limit, there would not even be any incentive to abuse such a service for regular file storage.) I would be happy for a few of my tax dollars to go towards keeping the lights on in a government data centre holding all this. Unlike piracy, this approach has the advantage of not violating the rights of the copyright holder.

In practice, it's undeniable that essentially all piracy is done thoughtlessly, for the immediate gain of the pirate, and because they technically can, so the idea that it is being done to better society seems extremely convenient to say the least. Even in cases where piracy winds up financially benefiting the creator due to the increased public awareness of their creation, it should be the creator's decision how much of this to allow, in the same way that I should have the right to throw a perfectly good apple I just bought in the bin if I want to.
by drcongo | 2026-02-25 10:06:05+00:00
Oh man, I don't think that essay would fit in a HN comment. The biggest one for me though was keyboard operation - I have fine motor control problems so try to use the trackpad as little as possible. 1Password used to have two different global keyboard shortcuts, one for the regular autofill interface and another that would pop up a mini version of 1Password that was fully keyboard navigable and could do almost everything the full 1Password app could do. I could hit Cmd+Opt+\ from anywhere and then entirely through keyboard interactions do almost anything I needed to do. This has been replaced by one global keyboard shortcut that only works if your focussed app is a browser with a login screen on it, and even then it often needs hitting multiple times in order for the interface to appear, and sometimes never appears at all until you finally give up and launch the 1Password app, and then magically you get the 1Password app with the 1Password mini interface over the top of it. It's one of the most frustrating experiences imaginable when it used to be such a useful thing.
by oblio | 2026-02-25 10:06:15+00:00
Join any Swift discussion here and you'll notice that Any Day Now™ Swift will be an awesome cross platform programming language[1]. Just like Objective C was :-)))

[1] Swift was first created in 2010, 16 years ago and officially launched in 2014, 12 years ago, by a huge multi-billion dollar corporation. The same corporation has launched hundreds of products and services in the same time period. If they really wanted Swift to be cross platform at a competitive level (Java, .Net, Python, JS, etc), they would have done it by now.
by latexr | 2026-02-25 10:06:56+00:00
> As someone who loves coding pet projects but is not a software engineer by profession, I find the paradigm of maintaining all these config files and environment variables exhausting

Then don’t.

> How do you deal with this better, my fellow professionals?

By not doing it.

Look, it’s your project. Why are you frustrating yourself? What you do is you set up your environment, your configuration, what you need/understand/prefer and that’s it. You’ll find out what those are as you go along. If you need, document each line as you add it. Don’t complicate it.
by sothatsit | 2026-02-25 10:07:26+00:00
I strongly disagree about CLI help being a good enough solution. Skills with CLIs backing them is the gold standard right now for a reason.

1. Skills let the agent know the CLI is available because they get an entry in the context window.

2. They let you provide a ton of organisational knowledge and processes that the agent would have a hard time figuring out from the CLI alone.

3. It is just more efficient to provide quick information in a skill than it is to require an agent to figure out every detail from CLI help messages alone every single time.
by 5o1ecist | 2026-02-25 10:08:12+00:00
No, the model does not change. Apparently I am getting downvoted, because people aren't aware of how perplexity.ai works.

I can't speak about other platforms, but on perplexity.ai the model adapts to your thinking processes. I know that, because not only did we talk about that, but I've been actively training it and benefitting from it. It's perfectly possible to train critical thinking and questioning things.

I've managed to massively reduce hallucinations and increase accuracy, prevent it from getting dumber from tool-usage and don't constantly get affirmations and fake happyness thrown at me.

Right until they've changed the underlying model from Sonar to GPT5, which reset its state. Now I have to look into repairing the damage or restarting alltogether.
by goku12 | 2026-02-25 10:08:16+00:00
There is one missing factor in your argument. The wealth transfer. The public was almost never the beneficiary of copyright and other IPs. Except perhaps its earliest phases where the copyright had a strict term limit, it was always the corporations who fought for it (Disney being the most infamous), using it to prevent the public from economically benefitting from their work almost forever.

And then people found a way to use the same copyright law to widely distribute their work without the fear of losing attribution or being exploited. Here comes along LLMs that abuse the 'fair use' argument to break attribution and monetize someone else's work. Which way does the money flow? To the corporations again.

IP when it suits them, fair-use when it benefits us. One splendid demonstration of this hypocrisy is how clawd and clawdbot were forced to rename (trademark law in this case). By twisting and reinterpreting laws in whatever way it suits them, these glorified marauders broke a trust mechanism that people relied on for openly sharing their work.

It incentivices ordinary people to hide their work from public. Don't assume that AI is going to solve that loss. The level of original thinking in LLMs is very suspect, despite the pompous and deceitful claims by its creators to the contrary. Meanwhile, the lack of knowledge sharing and cooperation on a global scale will throw civilizational growth rate back into the dark ages. Neither AI, nor corporations are yet anywhere near the creativity and original thinking as the world working together. Ultimately, LLMs serve only the continued one-way transfer of wealth in favor of an insatiably greedy minority, at the cost of losing the benefit of the internet (knowledge sharing) and an enormous damage to the environment - all of which actively harm the public.
by eesmith | 2026-02-25 10:08:38+00:00
Companies are required to follow the law.

These laws do not prohibit putting up political banners, but Amazon certainly cannot do whatever they want.

There are laws regarding price fixing, abuse of monopoly powers, discrimination on a protected class, product labeling, and making false and misleading statements about drugs.

If they sell Cuban-made cigars made with conventionally grown tobacco, then while they technically can put up a banner claiming "these organic, made in the USA cigars, if smoked twice daily, will cure epilepsy in children - buy now!", they'll have broken several laws.
by jessica01decor | 2026-02-25 10:09:02+00:00
Enthusiasts accumulate specialised equipment - sewing machines and fabric, painting supplies, model-making tools, crafting materials. An ottoman single bed dedicates storage space to hobbies without consuming living areas. The bed sits in spare rooms or home offices, keeping expensive equipment secure yet accessible. Fabrics remain flat and crease-free unlike cupboard storage where they fold and mark. Art supplies stay organised in stackable boxes within the ottoman, preventing the paint tube chaos common in kitchen drawer systems. For remote workers, the ottoman conceals work-from-home equipment - monitor stands, keyboards, document files - when the room reverts to guest bedroom function. The single size fits compact UK spare rooms averaging 8-10 square metres, proving that even modest spaces can accommodate serious hobbies when storage is efficient.