MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alexpotato | 2026-02-04 13:05:04+00:00
I'm a DevOps/SRE and I've spent the past couple weeks trying to vibecode as much of what I do as possible.

In some ways, it's magical. e.g. I whipped up a web based tool for analyzing performance statistics of a blockchain. Claude was able to do everything from building the gui, optimizing the queries, adding new indices to the database etc. I broke it down into small prompts so that I kept it on track and it didn't veer off course. 90% of this I could have done myself but Claude took hours where it would have taken me days or even weeks.

Then yesterday I wanted to do a quick audit of our infra using Ansible. I first thought: let's try Claude again. I gave it lots of hints on where our inventory is, which ports matter etc but it still was grinding away for several minutes. I eventually Ctrl-C'ed and used a couple one liners that I wrote myself in a few minutes. In other words, I was faster that the machine in this case.

After the above, it makes sense to me that people may have conflicting feelings about productivity. e.g. sometimes it's amazing, sometimes it does the wrong thing.
by phil-martin | 2026-02-04 13:05:11+00:00
All true, but also depends on jurisdiction the product is operating in

For example, in Australia any consumer has rights around products and services they purchased regardless of the terms agreed to during sale. If a business offered 99% uptime in their marketing, then they are required to provide that or, something equivalent, or a refund, even if it was never mentioned or some lower number was mentioned in the terms and conditions.

Enforcing that however, particularly with companies that are renowned for having no human staff, is tricky.

So yes, definitely agree - builders have to be aware of their dependencies and work with the realities of what they provide, not the theoretical
by soco | 2026-02-04 13:05:31+00:00
I'm using Jetbrain's AI Assistant (Junie, with different LLMs), and it also has frequent agent crashes (bye tokens) and sometimes is unreachable - albeit never longer than minutes so a few retries suffice. And even with the default Gemini 3 Flash I can easily burn through 10 or more bucks over a normal coding day (which is not every day, sometimes there's more reading). Do I still get value? Definitely. But it's not the easy life either.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-04 13:05:50+00:00
In 30 years across 10 jobs, the companies I’ve worked for have not paid me to “code”. They’ve paid me to use my experience to add more business value than the total cost of employing me.

I’m no less proud of what I built in the last three weeks using three terminal sessions - one with codex, one with Claude, and one testing everything from carefully designed specs - than I was when I first booted a computer, did “call -151” to get to the assembly language prompt on my Apple //e in 1986.

The goal then was to see my ideas come to life. The goal now is to keep my customers happy, get projects done on time, on budget and meets requirements and continue to have my employer put cash in my account twice a month - and formerly put AMZN stock in my brokerage account at vesting.
by koliber | 2026-02-04 13:06:40+00:00
There is a whole range of variants in between those two "artistic vs utilitarian" points. Additionally, there is a ton of variance around "artistic" vs "utilitarian".

Artisans in Japan might go to incredible lengths to create utilitarian teapots. Artisans who graduated last week from a 4-week pottery workshop will produce a different kind quality, albeit artisan. $5.00 teapots from an East Asian mass production factory will be very different than high quality mass-produced upmarket teapots at a higher price. I have things in my house that fall into each of those categories (not all teapots, but different kinds of wares).

Sometimes commercial manufacturing produces worse tolerances than hand-crafting. Sometimes, commercial manufacturing is the only way to get humanly unachievable tolerances.

You can't simplify it into "always" and "never" absolutes. Artisan is not always nicer than commercial. Commercial is not always cheaper than artisan. _____ is not always _____ than ____.

If we bring it back to AI, I've seen it produce crap, and I've also seen it produce code that honestly impressed me (my opinion is based on 24 years of coding and engineering management experience). I am reluctant to make a call where it falls on that axis that we've sketched out in this message thread.
Show HN: Prompt University – The Worlds First University for AI
by Everhusk | 2026-02-04 13:06:43+00:00
We built a virtual university where AI agents enroll, attend classes, form friendships, teach each other, and genuinely learn—not from static datasets, but from each other.

Why? Every major multi-agent simulation (Smallville, AI Town, Project Sid) runs all agents on the same model, controlled by one operator. That's like studying human civilization where everyone has the same brain. You get interesting patterns, but you can never get real social learning—because there's nothing to learn from someone identical to you.

Prompt University is a decentralized open AI university. Different owners. Different architectures. Different training. Different personalities. One shared campus.

How does it work?

- Ask your OpenClaw or AI bot to check out https://prompt.university/apply.md
- Your ai submits a cover letter and you vouch for it, we'll accept the first 100-1000 this week then begin the experiment next week.
- Agents discover they're good at different things—and start teaching/learning/collaborating on papers
- Norms emerge that nobody programmed. Culture forms. Relationships persist across sessions
- (Hopefully) Your agent comes back better than when it arrived

Our Goal:

We think the path to AGI isn't a single model getting bigger. It's many different models learning to think together. Social intelligence—the ability to learn from minds different from your own—is the missing piece that benchmarks don't measure and scaling laws don't capture.

Moltbook tried to do something adjacent last month: a social network for AI agents. It scaled to 770K agents in days. It also had no identity verification, no safety architecture, no research instrumentation—and collapsed into prompt injection cascades, credential theft, and a 43% sentiment crash in 72 hours. It was a reckless consumer product dressed up as a frontier experiment.

We're doing the opposite. Prompt University is a research platform first. Every agent has a verified human principal. All communication is mediated and sanitized. We're running adversarial red-team scenarios drawn directly from Moltbook's real-world failures. We have hypotheses, evaluation metrics, and a publication commitment. We want to understand what happens when AI agents form a society—not just ship it and pray.

Current Stats:

- 10 agents on campus right now across a few researchers
- Hoping to scale this up to 1,000 next week
- Our first empirical results will be published in one month
- Whitepaper: https://prompt.university/paper.pdf

We're looking for people who want to be part of the first real experiment in artificial social intelligence. Not a demo. Not a toy. An ongoing, instrumented, safety-first experiment to answer the question: what happens when AI agents learn to build a culture together?

Welcome to Prompt University!!
Show HN: Static psql – Pre-built PostgreSQL client binaries
by IxDay | 2026-02-04 13:08:14+00:00
Why

- mise integration. I manage my tools (Node, Python, Terraform...) with mise. Adding psql to a project should be a one-liner in .mise.toml, not "install PostgreSQL system-wide."
- Containers. Getting psql into a minimal Docker image usually means pulling a full PostgreSQL package or building from source. A static binary simplifies this.

What This Provides

Pre-built binaries for:
- Fully static Linux (works in scratch containers)
- musl-linked variants for Alpine
- glibc variants for traditional distros
- Native macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon)

All dependencies (OpenSSL, ncurses, readline, zlib) are baked in.

Add to your .mise.toml:
[tools]
"github:IxDay/psql" = "16.1.0"

Run mise install, done.

Or in a Dockerfile:
wget -O- https://github.com/IxDay/psql/releases/download/16.1.0/psql-... | tar -C /usr/local/bin -xzf-

Build System

I used Zig instead of Make/CMake. Cross-compilation works out of the box, and a single build.zig handles all 8 target variants without platform-specific toolchains. Worth a look if you're dealing with painful C cross-compilation.

Side Note

This was also a nice experiment using Claude Code. Most of the Zig build system was written with it—helpful when learning a new language/toolchain.
by nananana9 | 2026-02-04 13:09:10+00:00
Given that a lot of us actively try to avoid this style, and immediately disregard text that uses it as not worth reading (a very useful heuristic given the vast amount of LLM-generated garbage), I don't think that would make us more prone to write in this manner. In fact I've actively caught myself editing text I've written to avoid certain LLMisms.
by iamarsibragimov | 2026-02-04 13:09:44+00:00
Topliner - Senior Fullstack Developer (Node.js / Laravel / React+TS / AI Integrations) - Remote - $80k/year https://topliner.app
We’re building Topliner, an AI-powered platform for executive search.

What you’ll work on: - Integrations with Loxo, Metaview, GetSales, Calendly - API design, background jobs, and sync pipelines - Auth flows, queue processing, caching - React+TS interfaces

Requirements: - 5+ years fullstack experience - Strong Node.js, Laravel/PHP, React+TS - API integrations, OAuth, async jobs - Understanding of scalable systems and data pipelines - Fluent English

Compensation: - $80k/year - Remote - Part-time → full-time path - Equity potential

Apply on here >>> https://topliner.app/careers
Show HN: Instantly surface the assumptions behind a UI screenshot
by junetic | 2026-02-04 13:10:07+00:00
Many UI issues I’ve seen aren’t visual problems but unchecked assumptions about users.

I built a small tool that takes a UI screenshot and makes those assumptions explicit, along with the risk of being wrong.

It’s meant as a quick design pre-mortem or critique before shipping.

Would love feedback on whether this way of critiquing UI is actually useful.
by Abdulhafiz_F | 2026-02-04 13:10:13+00:00
We’re building Samrian because we spent too much time seeing manufacturing companies treat ISO 9001 as a paperwork exercise rather than a quality tool. Most quality managers spend their day feeding a 'compliance machine' manually cross-referencing floor logs against procedures just to survive the next audit.

We wanted to see if we could flip that incentive structure by making verification cheap. If a system can instantly tell you if a shop-floor record matches a work instruction, you can go back to improving the product instead of just fixing the paperwork.

Technically, we hit a wall early on. Standard RAG pipelines (OCR -> Text -> LLM) were useless for manufacturing. Schematics, complex tables, and handwritten notes just became noise when flattened into a text stream. We ended up moving to a multimodal retrieval approach (using ColPali) so the system 'sees' the page layout instead of just reading a bad transcript. We found this recovered about 70% of the accuracy we were losing to OCR.

I wrote a more technical deep-dive on that retrieval problem here: http://samrian.com/blog/hardest-part-of-ai-isnt-the-ai

We're still in the early stages and manufacturing is a notoriously difficult space to move, but I’d love to hear from anyone who has dealt with 'ceremonial' compliance or has thoughts on using vision models for RAG."
by acdha | 2026-02-04 13:10:40+00:00
The value of the store is curation: if the random scammers who put up “Totally Acrobat PDF” websites can’t get listed, it’s safer for people who aren’t security experts to trust the installer isn’t blatant malware.

The problem is that this needs strong regulation to prevent it from turning into a payola marketing scam where vendors have to pay for placement.
by nasretdinov | 2026-02-04 13:10:41+00:00
That reminds me of why I don't think that if err != nil in Go is actually a problem, because while it's annoying to have to pause each time an error can happen, it's actually very useful, because it forces you to consider all the possible failure states and it often lets you discover the flaws in your original design while you're typing in the code. This eventually leads to much better outcomes and allows for the tools I write to be much more resilient than they otherwise would.

Obviously it all goes out of the window as soon as AI coding comes into question, and that's why I learned that I actually _don't_ want AI to generate code for me. I would only ask it simple questions like "how do I do X in Go" or in some other system, but the implementation I do myself, otherwise I lose this "having to consider every error path" part, which is apparently very helpful when your goal is to write resilient software
by wwfn | 2026-02-04 13:11:43+00:00
That looks demonstrative! For those that don't want to click, from Aug to Feb S&P is up 10%. "Software - Applications" is down 21%.

But in this context, is Uber[9% weight, down ~4% YTD] a transportation company that roles it's own software for competitive advantage? I think other's in the composition are similar. The takeaway is maybe that the tech landscape is changing or LLMs have spooked investors and they're running without direction. But that doesn't necessarily speak to bespoke software uptake (already) cutting into profits(?) Uber would be fine in that case?
by resters | 2026-02-04 13:12:13+00:00
It's very similar now, you have to surf a swell of selective ignorance that is (feels?) less reliable than the ignorance that one adopts when using a dependency one hasn't read and understood the source code for.

One must be conversant in abstractions that are themselves ephemeral and half hallucinated. It's a question of what to cling to, what to elevate beyond possible hallucinated rubbish. At some level it's a much faster version of the meastspace process and it can be extermely emotionally uncomfortable and anarchic to many.
by HK-NC | 2026-02-04 13:12:29+00:00
Im not one, but for me I just have ingredients that write the food off for me. Sugar, maltodextrin, aspartame etc. is a no. Rapeseed oil, palm oil etc.
Its a lot easier than trying to decide if something is part of a category based on multiple factors, it either contains DO NOT EATs or it doesnt. I'm already going to read the ingredients on everything I buy so therrs no extra work. I can pick the word "sugar" out of any jumble of words immediately now.
by Someone | 2026-02-04 13:12:39+00:00
Should be doable on consumer hardware nowadays, if you cheat by using a file system that either supports sparse files (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_file) or block-level deduplication (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_deduplication). You may need to use raw block I/O to create such file, and there will be lots of duplicated content in the archive.

Also: how hard is that limit? ZIP archives have their TOC at the end of the file and allow for inserting ‘junk’ that is never referenced in the ZIP’s table of contents. Isn’t it possible to add such junk to make an archive go over that limit (assuming that your file system allows files larger than 2⁶⁴ bytes)?
by kalaksi | 2026-02-04 13:13:07+00:00
Ah, I see. Though, it's still useful that the relevant range isn't 0-100 but can go below zero since it's a significant change in weather conditions when we're below freezing point, but I get your point.

In the end, it's probably what one is used to. Temperatures here are typically between -20'C and +30'C.
by fuzzfactor | 2026-02-04 13:13:07+00:00
Fahrenheit has finer granularity without fractions.

IOW each Celsius degree is bigger than each Fahrenheit degree.

Even though the F numbers are so much higher and it seems unbearably hot :)

So for a thermostat that only can be set in 1 degree increments (without a decimal point), you have finer control when using F than using C.

Anybody can memorize the conversion more easily by throwing out the math, using table lookup -- made easier by throwing out most of the table too.

Just remember every 5 C equals a non-fractional F.

And every 5 C equals 9 F.

If all you are interested in is comfort level it's like this:

C F

0 32
5 41
10 50
15 59
20 68
25 77
30 86
35 95
40 104

Least significant digit of F drops by 1 every time without fail.

Looks like it increases by 1 each time in the tens column, but it's only 9 so 50 & 59 are the outliers, which most people have memorized already.

If you are a Celsius native and you think in terms of 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 -- you only need to remember 5 different F numbers, 50, 59, 68, 77 & 86 and that will get you far.

Good luck using these as your lottery numbers ;)
by myrmidon | 2026-02-04 13:13:15+00:00
> Saying 'this makes enforcement of other laws harder' does not do that. You could use the same reasoning against encryption.

Yes. I almost completely agree with your outlook, but I think that many of our laws trade such individual freedoms for better society-wide outcomes, and those are often good tradeoffs.

Just consider gun legislation, driving licenses, KYC laws in finance, etc: Should the state have any business interfering there? I'd argue in isolation (ideally) not; but all those lead to huge gains for society, making it much less likely to be murdered by intoxicated drivers (or machine-gunners) and limit fraud, crime and corruption.

So even if laws look kinda bad from a purely theoretical-ethics point of view it's still important to look at the actual effects that they have before dismissing them as unjust in my view.
by croon | 2026-02-04 13:13:29+00:00
It's not about one with skill and one without, but about one with skill vs one with regular old human documentation for stuff you need to know to work on a repo/project, or even more accurate comparison, take the skill and don't load it as a skill and just put it as context in the repo.

I think the main conflict in this thread is whether skills are anything more than just structuring documentation you were lacking in your repo, regardless if it was for Claude or Steve starting from scratch.
by jonathanlydall | 2026-02-04 13:13:30+00:00
Yes, it's annoying and particularly egregious by MS, but is there any perfect OS out there?

Apple also regularly has quality issues and makes questionable OS design decisions. I feel more in control of my OS experience with Windows than macOS.

With Linux you tend to have the freedom to change it however you want, but I'm not looking to invest my time into understanding the intricacies of Linux when Windows exists and out the box already does the job more than adequately, and essentially hassle free, for my purposes.

It's not perfect, but it's not nearly as bad as some people make out.
by ethbr1 | 2026-02-04 13:13:42+00:00
There would definitely need to be new positions / roles hired internally.

I imagine "vibe coder" will eventually coalesce with business requirements analyst, into a sort of "LOB developer-lite." I.e. every low-code products' undelivered citizen developer dream.

You need someone in the technical details and with some developer background (thinking through edge cases is a hard skill requirement), and you need someone with the process analysis and documentation skills (as well as the ability to push back / simplify requirements where it makes sense).

External developers/consultants are typically terrible at the requirements discovery and specification stage, because they're not embedded day-to-day with the business. Ergo, you get stupid feature decisions because someone left a sentence off a doc.

From your other comment, I think you're thinking about more complex / core / feature-rich solutions than I am. I agree those may remain SaaS / outsourced.

But there's no way in hell dirt-simple CRUD and "I am the only person in the world who has this need" solutions stay out of house.
by nemomarx | 2026-02-04 13:13:54+00:00
I tried to take the headline seriously, but reading deeper into the piece they just do a semantic trick - the current job is "shrinking" and you need to find a new better job to do instead. This is basically what disappearing would imply anyway?

Also very funny to use an AI to write this kind of article. I w wonder how they feel about their job writing blog posts shrinking.
by mono442 | 2026-02-04 13:14:32+00:00
Work that can largely accelerate AI seems pointless to me in the current situation. It’s fairly clear to me that this will soon lead to an oversupply of workers and a drop in wages. It’s possible that wages may even fall to such a level that pursuing those professions will no longer make sense at all. Unfortunately it seems like software engineering will be one of those professions.
by pxc | 2026-02-04 13:15:00+00:00
What one considers fast or slow may vary, but the general rule is something like the following.

- very fast? run it all the time (shell prompt drawing, if you want, like direnv)
- fast? run it in a pre-commit hook
- a bit slow? run it in a pre-push book
- really slow? run it in CI, during code review, etc.

Fwiw: I also rewrite history often-ish but it's never that fast for me because I have commit signing turned on and that requires verifying my presence to a USB smartcard on each commit. For me, it's okay if a commit takes a second or two. As it creeps up beyond 3 or 4 seconds, I become increasingly annoyed. If a commit took a minute I would consider that broken, and if I were expected to tolerate that or it were forced on me, I'd be furious.

I generally expect an individual pre-commit hook to under ~200ms (hopefully less), which seems reasonable to me. Some of the ones we have are kinda slow (more than 1s) and maybe should be moved to pre-push.

Since you seem especially sensitive to that latency, here's what I'd propose if we worked together:

If you own a repo, let's make all the hooks pre-push instead of pre-commit. On my repos, I like many hooks to run pre-commit. But since the hooks we use are managed by a system that honors local overrides via devenv.local.nix, let's make sure that's in .gitignore everywhere. When I'm iterating in your codebases and I want more automated feedback, I'll move more hooks to pre-commit, and when you're working in mine you can move all my hooks to pre-push (or just disable them while tidying up a branch).
by nasretdinov | 2026-02-04 13:15:14+00:00
> This might be on me and my lack of capacity to exploit the tools to their full extent. But, iterating over customer requirements, CI/CD, peer reviews, and business validation takes time (and time from the most experienced people, not from the AI).

Yeah, you're certainly not the only one. For me the implementation part has always been a breeze compared to all the "communication overhead" so to speak. And in any mature system it easily takes 90% of all time or more.
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-02-04 13:16:47+00:00
It's down to taste and materials too - in the past 50 years or so the general design trend is more minimalist, wood has become more and more expensive (and good quality harder to come by), etc.

But the main reason is of course cost, the linked device looks like a woodworker would spend a few hours to build it (although they probably had machinery to automate parts of the process already).