MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by soulofmischief | 2026-02-16 12:47:35+00:00
It is not anthropomorphism. It is literally a prediction model and saying that a model "assumes" something is common parlance. This isn't new to neural models, this is a general way that we discuss all sorts of models from physical to conceptual.

And in the case of an LLM, walking a noncommutative path down a probabilistic knowledge manifold, it's incorrect to oversimplify the model's capabilities as simply parroting a training dataset. It has an internal world model and is capable of simulation.
Show HN: Yell into the void to find others via semantic search
by ddtaylor | 2026-02-16 12:47:47+00:00
Hi HN,

I made Voidful, a kind-of-anti-social network where users can yell into the void to see how many other people are yelling the same thing. If you yell something similar, this is considered an "echo" and you gain access to a chat room about that topic with other users being notified.

Currently when users yell into the same void they are brought into a chat together, but this is somewhat of an MVP. In the future that chat may have guard rails related to the topic, rewards left by other users, and possibly more!

A key concept is that users can never enumerate or list the voids, as otherwise it will likely turn into a vanity war like traditional social media, which in my opinion is at the all-time-high for gamification. I am trying to remove the incentive to say random stuff to make line go up.

I am interested in how people use this kind of technology. I believe in the future when more consumer devices are capable of inference this will be adapted to be more client side and anonymous, with the vector database using homomorphic encryption via [HEVEC].

Check it out: https://void.devrupt.io

This was similar to my last experiment, [Ethos], also with very low inference cost using `qwen3-8b` for the LLM and `qwen3-embedding-8b` for the embedding.

Any feedback about subjects you give it and incorrect analysis is appreciated. I am curious what happens if a lot of people go into a chat at once, and it makes sense to try "Hacker News" as a chat topic.

[Ethos]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46993774

[HEVEC]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873962
by swiftcoder | 2026-02-16 12:48:48+00:00
> It's telling me that I should rather focus on getting viral/lucky to get a shot at "success".

I'm pretty sure that's meant to be the general lesson of the last 20 years or so in Silicon Valley, but it's just survivorship bias in action.

You don't hear a whole lot about the quietly successful engineers who work a 9-till-5 and then go home to see their wife and kids. But you do constantly hear about the folks who made it big YOLO'ing their career and finances on the latest a startup/memecoin/vibecoded app...
by vladdoster | 2026-02-16 12:48:51+00:00
Location: Nashville, TN
Remote: true
Willing to relocate: boston || nashville
Technologies: Python, Django, IaC, Terraform, Golang, CI/CD, Azure/AWS, {ba,z}sh, Lua, Springboot,
Redis, Docker, Open Service Broker, {,non}relational & vector dbs, shared services, SOA
Email: mvdoster@gmail.com

resume: https://linkedin.vdoster.com && http://github.com/vladdoster

sr. cloud software engineer @ Mastercard (5 years)

Designed and built Platform-as-a-Service for microservice workloads running on Azure and AWS
to migrate on-prem workloads to the cloud. The platform operates globally, allowing teams to
deploy to several Azure-backed regions worldwide. Helped plan and create regional landing zones
in Azure for application teams wanting to perform globally. Designed platform components using
Terraform, Go, and Node; developed support tooling using Bash, Python, and Azure CLI. De-risk the
platform by addressing security vulnerabilities and ensuring the platform is PCI compliant.

api/devops software engineer @ Harvard Medical School (2 years)

Worked as part of the DevOps team to manage a 15k core CentOS HPC cluster. Designed and implemented
Python-based security scanning pipeline to securely deploy & run Apptainer images via SLURM.
Coordinated cross-team emergency patching eﬀorts. Collaborated with researchers and engineers across
3-letter institutions to deliver secure research infrastructure. Built CI/CD Pipelines with GitHub, Jenkins,
to automate code builds, testing, and deployments. Wrote Puppet modules to manage configuration of HPC fleet.
Wrote custom Puppet module & Python scripts to automatically remediate Tenable findings.

full-stack software engineer @ Global Prior Art (3 years)

Used Django, Celery, Selenium grid, and AWS API Gateway for IP rotation to scrape USPTO patent PDFs,
apply CV for data extraction, and generate reports with relevant claims, saving employees 4-5 hours daily.
Wrote E2E black-box/fuzzing unit tests. Automated on-premise deployment via Github Actions and Ansible.

maintainer @ Zinit (5 years)

Develop and maintain a zsh plugin manager on Github with 4k stars. Implemented unit tests,
containerization, bug fixes, and new features.
See: https://github.com/zdharma-continuum/zinit

contributor @ Open-source documentation (5 years)

Contributed hundreds of documentation corrections and enhancements to 400+ open source projects.
by xavortm | 2026-02-16 12:48:55+00:00
for writing - instead, it might've been more useful of a plugin if it was targeted at specific problem. Example - creative writing - if you had LSP-like feature on top that can link to characters, scenes, add scenes, find chapters, jump between content. Add character bio, traits and more and have easy "peak" as in a function signature to see details. I know it's different than what the plugin showcases, just sharing thoughts on what I find as a meaningful feature add. here, it's just as commented below, it's basically Vim.
Show HN: A collection of drop-in sections for Shopify development
by wspycnews | 2026-02-16 12:49:07+00:00
Hi HN,
I've put together a collection of open-source Shopify sections (Liquid, CSS, JS) that can be added to themes.
I built this because I found that while Shopify is great, standard themes often lack specific sections, and custom development can be expensive for small merchants. I wanted to create a repository of high-quality, copy-pasteable sections that developers can use to speed up their workflow or merchants can use to enhance their stores without apps.
The repo includes code for headers, footers, hero banners, and feature grids. It's all standard Liquid/HTML/CSS.
I’d love to hear your feedback on the code structure or requests for other common sections that are usually missing from default themes.
by xg15 | 2026-02-16 12:50:04+00:00
> Cherny responded to the feedback by making changes. "We have repurposed the existing verbose mode setting for this," he said, so that it "shows file paths for read/searches. Does not show full thinking, hook output, or subagent output (coming in tomorrow's release)."

How to comply with a demand to show more information by showing less information.
by TheWas7ed | 2026-02-16 12:50:52+00:00
This has been my experience also, but i've been using everything (Claude code, open code, copilot, etc...) It's impressive when I ask it to do something I don't know how like some python apps, but when it's in my stack I have to constantly stop it mid processing and ask it to fix something. I'm still validanting the plan and rewriting a lot of the code because the quality just is not there yet.

And for the most part I use either opus or sonnet, but for planning sometimes I switch to chatgpt since I think claude is too blunt and does not ask enough questions. I also have local setups with OLlama and have tried for personal projects some kimi models. The results are the same for all, but again claude models are slighly better.
by redhale | 2026-02-16 12:51:34+00:00
> For apps that run locally—no servers, no cloud costs—subscriptions make no sense anymore. The only real cost is development, and that's becoming negligible. If someone charges $10/month for a local PDF editor, someone else will build a clone for $5 one-time. Then someone will make it free.

There are plenty of things to be sad about when it comes to AI. But the loss of this kind of "subscription" app is not one of them, imo.

Good riddance to this hellscape of a market. We now face the dawning of a new slopocalypse era, and its whole new set of problems.
by wisty | 2026-02-16 12:51:34+00:00
The nightmare scenario - they "know", but are trained to make us feel clever by humouring our most bone headed requests.

Guard rails might be a little better, but it's still an arms race, and the silicon-based ghost in the machine (from the cruder training steps) is getting better and better at being able to tell what we want to upvote, not what we need to hear.

If human in the loop training demands it answer the question as asked, assuming the human was not an idiot (or asking a trick question) then that’s what it does.
by the_harpia_io | 2026-02-16 12:51:43+00:00
yeah you're spot on - the whole "can't fault AI for bugs" mindset is exactly the problem. like, if a junior dev shipped code that crashed on malformed input we'd send it back for proper validation, why would we accept worse from AI? I keep seeing this pattern where people lower their bar because the AI "mostly works" but then you get these silent failures or weird edge case explosions that are way harder to debug than if you'd just written defensive code from the start. honestly the scariest bugs aren't the ones that blow up in your face, it's the ones that slip through and corrupt data or expose something three deploys later
by kapep | 2026-02-16 12:51:59+00:00
> 2. The market for vintage quality clothing is super strong and booming. You don't need to export it.

The market for regular second-hand clothes is on the verge of collapsing in Germany though. Charities are flooded with low quality and unsalable stuff ever since it was made illegal to throw away clothes in the regular trash. You must bring them to recycling facilities instead now. It not profitable for charities to sort through them because of the volume. There is a market for quality vintage clothes but that's a totally different thing.

> 3. No fashion brand wants to be anywhere near associated to clothing the poor. It's a pr disaster.

That's probably the only thing that motivates brands not to overproduce. But lets be real, they will rather find loopholes for destroying them instead of selling them for cheap.
by KronisLV | 2026-02-16 12:52:36+00:00
> Us having to specify things that we would never specify when talking to a human.

The first time I read that question I got confused: what kind of question is that? Why is it being asked? It should be obvious that you need your car to wash it. The fact that it is being asked in my mind implies that there is an additional factor/complication to make asking it worthwhile, but I have no idea what. Is the car already at the car wash and the person wants to get there? Or do they want to idk get some cleaning supplies from there and wash it at home? It didn't really parse in my brain.
by kachapopopow | 2026-02-16 12:53:13+00:00
I always review every single change / file in full and spend around 40% of the time it takes to produce something doing so. I assume it's the same for a lot of people who used to develop code and swapped to mostly code generation (since it's just faster). The spend I time looking at it depends on how much I care about it - something you don't really get writing things manually.
by dangus | 2026-02-16 12:53:21+00:00
Good for you! I do. Why should I celebrate the wins of multimillionaires when I am paid less than I was in 2018 after adjusting for inflation?

OpenAI and its lying scum of a CEO is part of the hypercapitalist problems in our society. Their stated goal is to make my profession obsolete and ruin my life. I’m sure in 5 years I’ll be making even less money.

Sam Altman literally lied about being the chairman of the board of Y Combinator. I’m not going to celebrate some asshole going to work for some asshole like that at an annual salary I could instantly retire on.
by schmeichel | 2026-02-16 12:53:44+00:00
As someone who writes academic essays and prose, I can't live without this plugin. I will constantly need to write multiple page paragraphs, and it's incredibility more convient to be able to navigate within a paragraph as if it was multiple lines, as opposed to needing to perform some horizontal motion gymnastics to get the cursor where I need it to be.

Hat's off to everyone who has worked on this plugin!
by the_harpia_io | 2026-02-16 12:54:37+00:00
the hiding stuff is weird because the whole reason you'd want to see what Claude is doing isn't just curiosity - it's about catching when it goes off the rails before it makes a mess. like when it starts reading through your entire codebase because it misunderstood what you asked for, or when it's about to modify files you didn't want touched. the verbose mode fix is good but honestly this should've been obvious from the start - if you're letting an AI touch your files, you want to know exactly which files. not because you don't trust the tool in theory but because you need to verify it's doing what you actually meant, not what it thinks you meant. abstractions are great until they hide the thing that's about to break your build
by gosub100 | 2026-02-16 12:55:04+00:00
Why not regulate thrift stores and force them to have 40% of their inventory at fixed prices? $3 for shirts and $7 for pants/shorts? Part of the problem, at least in the US, is that thrift stores are filled to capacity. But just like everywhere else, their prices are high as well. If we want to interfere with a free market, why not start there, to force higher turnover and keep them from rejecting donations?
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-02-16 12:55:49+00:00
The real real fun begins when you consider that with every new generation of models + harnesses they become better at this. Where better can mean better at sorting good / bad repos, better at coming up with good scenarios, better at following instructions, better at navigating the repos, better at solving the actual bugs, better at proposing bugs, etc.

So then the next next version is even better, because it got more data / better data. And it becomes better...

This is mainly why we're seeing so many improvements, so fast (month to month, from every 3 months ~6 monts ago, from every 6 months ~1 year ago). It becomes a literal "throw money at the problem" type of improvement.

For anything that's "verifiable" this is going to continue. For anything that is not, things can also improve with concepts like "llm as a judge" and "council of llms". Slower, but it can still improve.
by znnajdla | 2026-02-16 12:56:26+00:00
Tasks completed in my todo list software I’ve been measuring my output for 5 years. Time saved because I built one off tools to automate many common workflows. And yes even dollars earned.

I don’t mean 3x compounding monthly every month, I mean 3x total since I started using Claude Code about 6 months ago but the benefits keep compounding.
by tonyarkles | 2026-02-16 12:57:17+00:00
It's still SQLite, they just need to make money: https://sqlite.org/prosupport.html

Edit: also this:

> TH3 Testing Support. The TH3 test harness is an aviation-grade test suite for SQLite. SQLite developers can run TH3 on specialized hardware and/or using specialized compile-time options, according to customer specification, either remotely or on customer premises. Pricing for this services is on a case-by-case basis depending on requirements.
by glimshe | 2026-02-16 12:58:13+00:00
There's clearly easy/irrational money distorting the markets here. Normally this wouldn't be a problem: prices would go up, supply would eventually increase and everybody would be okay. But with AI being massively subsidized by nation-states and investors, there's no price that is too high for these supplies.

Eventually the music will stop when the easy money runs out and we see how much people are truly willing to pay for AI.
by ho_schi | 2026-02-16 12:58:20+00:00
Thank you! I assume “didn’t train” is correct. Probably my favorite mistake! I like it when people point out mistakes, give me corrections, and explain why. The reason is crucial.

Maybe “hadn’t trained” is even better. Makes sensewhen ordering times. But I don’t trust LLMs an inch. I make up options for git, and both GCC and CLANG are often immediately telling me that the LLM is lying.

Cookieengineer and illichosky are right.
by swiftcoder | 2026-02-16 12:58:58+00:00
> There are only so many safety-first companies and products

There are only so many companies that think of themselves as safety-first. In practice, basically all companies work on things that should be safety-first.

Does your software store user data? Congrats, you are now on the hook for GDPR and a bunch of similar data handling regulations.

Does your software include a messaging component? You are now responsible for moderating abusive actors in your chat.

Does your software allow users to upload images? Now you are a potential distribution vector for CSAM.

And so on... safety isn't just for things which can cause immediate death and dismemberment
by mathgeek | 2026-02-16 12:59:03+00:00
> It is hard to express in more definitive terms on which side of that liberty-versus-security trade-off the U.S. was intended to fall.

While I agree with Henry, and intend for _my_ life and social impact to fall there, "where the U.S. was intended to fall" is a misnomer here. That quote was one man's opinion. The U.S. is millions of living beings who, if they have liberty, should get to do whatever they want with it (which in itself is an oxymoron).
by redhale | 2026-02-16 12:59:33+00:00
You need to give it the tools to check its own work, and remove yourself from that inner low-level error resolution loop.

If you're building a web app, give it a script that (re)starts the full stack, along with Playwright MCP or Chrome DevTools MCP or agent-browser CLI or something similar. Then add instructions to CLAUDE.md on how and when to use these tools. As in: "IMPORTANT: You must always validate your change end-to-end using Playwright MCP, with screenshot evidence, before reporting back to me that you are finished.".

You can take this further with hooks to more forcefully enforce this behavior, but it's usually not necessary ime.
by alex43578 | 2026-02-16 13:00:02+00:00
To massively oversimplify, they are all boxes that predict the next token based on material they’ve seen before + human training for desirable responses.

You’d have to have a very poorly RLHF’d model (or a very weird system prompt) for it to draw you a Terminator, pastoral scene, or pelican riding a bicycle as its self image :)

I think that’s what made Grok’s Mechahitler glitch interesting: it showed how astray the model can run if you mess with things.
Show HN: Create new calendar systems by factorizing
by szemy2 | 2026-02-16 13:00:57+00:00
I was playing around with divisors of numbers near 365 and realized you can generate a ton of valid calendar systems by picking a highly composite base (like 360) and treating the leftover days as end-of-year extra holidays.

365 is nearly prime (5×73), which is why our months are such a mess. But 360 has 24 divisors; enough to build clean hierarchies like 6-day weeks, 5-week months, 3-month quarters, 4 quarters/year + 5 holidays (6 on leap years). Every month identical, every date always the same weekday.

Built a small tool to explore all valid factorizations across different bases (336, 350, 354, 360, 364, 365), with a Gregorian comparison view that really highlights how arbitrary the current system is. Radial year visualization, work/rest analysis, season alignment, etc.

I've also added historical calendars, like the French Revolutionary calendar that was created in a similar sentiment.

Code facilitated by Claude Opus 4.6

Let me know what I should add, or if you catch a bug/mistaken logic!
by graemep | 2026-02-16 13:02:14+00:00
That sounds more like someone who over-uses regexes - the developer is the problem, not the language

TCL has a lot of options for manipulating strings - take a look at just the built in string command for a start: https://www.tcl-lang.org/man/tcl8.4/TclCmd/string.htm

I have seen terrible code in Python, C, and more.
by appreciatorBus | 2026-02-16 13:03:14+00:00
Regardless where demand comes from, it takes time to spin up a hard drive factory, and prices would have to rise enough that, as a producer, you would feel confident that a new hard drive factory will actually pay off. Conversely, if you feel that boom is irrational and temporary, as a producer you’d be quite wary of investing money in a new factory if there was a risk it would be producing into a glut in a few years.
by wiseowise | 2026-02-16 13:03:41+00:00
GP said Western block (+1bn people) are fighting with Ukrainians against Russians which is factually incorrect. Everything in your comment about my assumptions is just a figment of your imagination.

> Do you support tax hikes to allow more money to be sent? Do you want a direct military involvement and are you prepared to be drafted, or have your children be, to the front lines, even if that means direct attacks by drones/missiles on many of your cities in retaliation ? Most people answer no to those questions, otherwise they would be demanding that and in a democracy people do get what they want if the majority agrees, yet we don’t see anyone in Europe going to the streets or even signing major petitions or anything like that!

I see, another one. I must've rattled the hive with my comment, haha.
by briansm | 2026-02-16 13:03:46+00:00
I think this lack of 'G' (generality, or modality) is the problem. A human visualizes this kind of problem (a little video plays in my head of taking a car to a car wash). LLM's don't do this, they 'think' only in text, not visually.

A proper AGI would have have to have knowledge in video, image, audio and text domains to work properly.
Show HN: InitRunner – YAML to AI Agent with RAG, Memory, and an API
by Asciilotle | 2026-02-16 13:04:09+00:00
I wanted a way to prototype an agent and have it serving requests in minutes, InitRunner is a YAML-first platform where one config file gives you a working agent with RAG, memory, and an API endpoint.

apiVersion: initrunner/v1
kind: Agent
metadata:
name: acme-support
description: Support agent for Acme Corp
spec:
role: You are a support agent for Acme Corp.
model:
provider: openai
name: gpt-4o-mini
ingest:
sources:
- ./docs/*/.md
- ./knowledge/*/.pdf
memory:
max_memories: 1000

initrunner ingest agent.yaml
initrunner run agent.yaml -i
initrunner serve agent.yaml --port 3000

Three commands: ingest your docs, test interactively, serve over HTTP. The agent gets search_documents, remember, and recall tools auto-registered. No code to wire up.

Point Open WebUI or any OpenAI client at localhost:3000/v1 and you have a full chat interface over your knowledge base with persistent memory across sessions.

Built on PydanticAI, SQLite + sqlite-vec. No Redis, no Postgres, no infra.

curl -fsSL https://initrunner.ai/install.sh | sh
by szszrk | 2026-02-16 13:04:47+00:00
I honestly think it's not that simple.

The ones who spend billions on integrating public cloud LLM services are not the ones writing that function. They are managers who based on data pulled out of thin air say "your goal for this year is to increase productivity by X%. With AI, while staffing is going slightly down".

I have to watch AI generated avatars on the most boring topics imaginable, because the only "documentation" and link to actual answer is in a form of fake person talking. And this is encouraged!

Then the only measure of success is either AI services adoption (team count), or sales data.

That is the real tragedy and the real scale - big companies pushing (external!) AI services without even proof that it justifies the cost alone. Smooth talking around any other metric (or the lack of it).