MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by abanana | 2026-02-12 13:58:23+00:00
> How many of them are there?

Indeed, this reads as a case of somebody forgetting that the news doesn't report what's absolutely normal to everybody. It reports what's unusual. (Plus all the articles that misrepresent people's opinions either deliberately for clicks, or accidentally through lack of understanding, sometimes due to being given a quota of articles to rush out per day.)

Perhaps the universalizing mistake is going a little bit in both directions here.

There's a huge current trend where people love to tar an entire generation with the same brush. When a person a generation or more removed (in either direction) says something we personally disagree with, it's become the norm to put down that entire generation as though they share the same viewpoint. It's a very unfortunate trend IMO because it often comes across as arrogant and/or patronising.
by allisdust | 2026-02-12 13:58:23+00:00
In case its not clear, the vehicle might be the agent/bot but the whole thing is heavily drafted by its owner.

This is a well known behavior by OpenClown's owners where they project themselves through their agents and hide behind their masks.

More than half the posts on moltbook are just their owners ghost writing for their agents.

This is the new cult of owners hurting real humans hiding behind their agentic masks. The account behind this bot should be blocked across github.
by 4d4m | 2026-02-12 13:58:49+00:00
Smallest violin for those shutting down R&D only to extract the max $ value from existing user bases, vultures loading companies with debt to grind them into a husk then sell them. PE is doing great and is currently reducing the quality of nearly everything it touches, from your previously favorite vet and dentist to the previously mom and pop a/c repairman fixing your air conditioner. All zombies now part of the host.
by athrowaway3z | 2026-02-12 13:59:17+00:00
> This Isn't About Politics

> I'm a veteran. I served under both parties. I don't care which side of the aisle fixes this.

The idea that there are things entirely unpartisan or unpolitical is a polite fiction we can work with when things are somewhere around normal - usually even when things are pretty far from normal.

I get the army drilled this stance into you, but at some point the price the people pay for corruption includes their security.

It is, in fact, about politics.
by Denzel | 2026-02-12 13:59:28+00:00
Apologies, I may have misinterpreted the passage below from your repo:

> This crate was developed with the assistance of Claude Opus 4.5 initially to answer the shower thought "would the Braille Unicode trick work to visually simulate complex ball physics in a terminal?" Opus 4.5 one-shot the problem, so I decided to further experiment to make it more fun and colorful.
by RupertSalt | 2026-02-12 13:59:38+00:00
Traditional malware relies on delivery of “payload” with a custom program and data, and/or establishing persistence by installing files to local storage.

These behaviors generate distinctive evidence of compromise in-progress, active, and after the fact, so your AV software or forensics team can identify it.

“Living off the Land” means minimizing or eliminating the payloads and the system modifications, and leveraging anything and everything that is found already existing in the system.

Obviously while presenting extra logistical challenges, LOL can be stealthier and easier to deploy on your target systems.
Show HN: MCP server for generating images directly in Claude Code
by maheshcr | 2026-02-12 14:00:16+00:00
I built an MCP server that handles the full image lifecycle from within Claude Code: generate, preview variations, select, upload to cloud storage, get a CDN URL.

The motivation was simple — every blog post needs images, and the workflow of open-separate-tool → generate → download → upload → copy-URL is tedious. This collapses it into one conversation.

What's implemented:

- Providers: Google Gemini (free tier), Fal.ai (Flux models)
- Storage: Cloudflare R2 (free egress), local
- Cost tracking: SQLite-backed, monthly budgets
- Interactive setup wizard
- In-session configuration (switch providers without restart)
- 264 unit tests, CI on Node 18/20/22

What's on the roadmap: Together.ai, Replicate, HuggingFace providers. Backblaze B2 storage.

TypeScript, ~2,100 lines of production code, 37 kB package. MIT licensed.

Happy to answer questions about MCP server architecture or the design decisions.
by lunar_mycroft | 2026-02-12 14:01:19+00:00
> Who told the agent to write the blog post though? I'm sure they told it to blog, but not necessarily what to put in there.

I don't think it matters. You as the operator of the computer program are responsible for ensuring (to a reasonable degree) that the agent doesn't harm others. If you own a viscous dog and let it roam about your neighborhood as it pleases, you are responsible when/if it bites someone, even if you didn't directly command it to do so. The same applies logic should apply here.
by Grimblewald | 2026-02-12 14:01:26+00:00
I'm a Claude user who has been burned lately by how opaque the system has become. My workflows aren't long and my projects are small in terms of file count, but the work is highly specialized. It is "out of domain" enough that I'm getting "what is the seahorse emoji" style responses for genuine requests that any human in my field could easily follow.
I've been testing Claude on small side projects to check its reliability. I work at the cutting edge of multiple academic domains, so this is exciting for me, but right now Claude cannot be trusted to get things right without constant oversight and frequent correction—often for just a single step.
For people like me, this is make or break. If I cannot follow the reasoning, read the intent, or catch logic disconnects early, the session just burns through my token quota. I'm stuck rejecting all changes after waiting 5 minutes for it to think, only to have to wait 5 hours to try again. Without being able to see the "why" behind the code, it isn't useful. It makes typing "claude" into my terminal an exercise in masochism rather than the productivity boost it's supposed to be.
I get that I might not be the core target demographic, but it's good PR for Anthropic if Claude is credited in the AI statements of major scientific publications. As it stands, trajectory in develeopment means I cannot in good conscience recommend Claude Code for scientific domains.
Show HN: Notaly – A note app where you don't organize, you query
by vajafafa | 2026-02-12 14:01:27+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a desktop note app called Notaly.

Most note apps assume you should organize everything upfront —
folders, tags, backlinks, hierarchies.
In practice, I found myself either over-organizing or not organizing at all.

Notaly is built around a different idea:
write freely, mark lines as data, and query them later.

You don’t decide where notes belong.
You decide what a line means.

For example:
- I write meeting notes, study notes, random thoughts — anywhere.
- When a line represents something actionable, I mark it as a TODO.
- Queries automatically collect those TODOs across all pages into one live view.

There’s no dedicated “task page” or manual linking.
Queries always reflect the current state of your notes.

Key ideas:
- No upfront structure
- Local-first desktop app
- Markdown-based
- Queries over folders or tags

It’s still early, and I’m actively refining the query model and UX.
I’d love feedback on whether this mental model makes sense and where it breaks.

Short demo video on the landing page:
https://notaly.dev

Thanks for reading.
by akudha | 2026-02-12 14:01:33+00:00
People throughout Wales sing this song 130 years later

I wonder how far are we from a song that is entirely generated by AI and becomes as loved as a song created by a human, and is still sung/played by people decades later? It feels weird to even think about it.

If AI does get as good as humans at creating art (I think it might), what happens then? Will human generated art be still as respected/valuable? Will humans even bother creating art at that stage?

On the topic of basic income - people seem to have strong opinions on both sides. I guess time will tell, but there isn't anything wrong in experimenting, at minimum. To those who strongly oppose UBI - don't we already give bailouts, huge tax breaks, subsidies to entire industries etc, to the extent of rewarding bad behavior (criminal behavior even) - like the one that caused 2008 crash? Why is corporate handouts okay but not UBI?
by throw0101a | 2026-02-12 14:01:52+00:00
Various archives:

* https://archive.org/details/BYTE-MAGAZINE-COMPLETE/197509_By...

* https://archive.org/download/BYTE-MAGAZINE-COMPLETE

* https://vintageapple.org/byte/

* https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Byte_Magazine.htm

* 5mo ago, "Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45028002

Had a subscription to it in the 1990s. Probably one of the best computing magazines that existed (it covered all sorts of topics, from CPU cache workings to file systems (like Veritas)).
Show HN: ZeroSum – Zero-base budgeting $40/yr(Got tired of paying $109 for YNAB)
by fidalgodev | 2026-02-12 14:02:09+00:00
I've been a YNAB user for years but couldn't justify $109/yr for an app where I never used bank sync. So I built my own.

ZeroSum is zero-based budgeting (same envelope method) with a full YNAB import wizard — bring your entire budget history over. 50+ currencies, shared budgets, analytics, keyboard shortcuts. $40/yr.

Stack: React (Vite + TanStack Router) on Cloudflare Pages, Hono + tRPC on Render.

Happy to talk about the technical decisions.

Try it free for 35 days: https://zerosum.so
by cardanome | 2026-02-12 14:03:06+00:00
> My (likely unfair) impression of D is that it feels a bit rudderless

The more positive phrasing would be that it is a very pragmatic language. And I really like this.

Currently opinionated langues are really in vogue. Yes they are easier to market but I have personally very soured on this approach now that I am a bit older.

There is not one right way to program. It is fun to use on opinionated language until you hit a problem that it doesn't cover very well and suddenly you are in a world of pain. I like languages that give me escape hatches. That allow me to program they way I want to.
by rob74 | 2026-02-12 14:03:40+00:00
> (sorry Radon and Oganesson)

With Radon it might even be conceivably possible (not sure how hard it is to get and if any restrictions apply because of its radioactivity), and it would work for a few years, because it has a half-life of 3.825 days (EDIT: this is of course complete nonsense, the "." is a decimal point, so it will only work for a few days). In the quantities needed for a gas tube (and as long as it stays in the tube!), I guess it should also be relatively safe, but I'm not an expert. Apparently it produces red light when used in a tube. Oganesson however has a half-life of 0.7 ms, so, aside from how expensive it would be to synthesize enough of it, it's doesn't stay around long enough for any experiments...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oganesson
by badhorseman | 2026-02-12 14:03:54+00:00
I wrote a fun bit of code to do something like this but for bell sounds in emacs terminal sessions and other things (even using the peasant). but I agree it seems very over engineered. There is a json manifest file to explain which sounds should be used where in this repo, why not just use directories for each alert type, making it easier to modify, it seems completely unnecessary to me. having an install script seems crazy as well. The task is to play the right sound(s) that match the passed argument. the thing I did was like 23 lines and most of that was filtering and looking for ascii bell to play the sound then remove it from the stream and other options.
by bluesnowmonkey | 2026-02-12 14:05:00+00:00
Along the same lines: I want the context window percentage visible at all times, not just when it drops below 10%. By that point it's too late to do anything useful. I can't even get it to finish up and dump its state to a file before the window is full. If I could see the percentage the whole time, I could pace my work and wrap things up cleanly instead of slamming into the wall.
Ask HN: What do you need help with?
by asim | 2026-02-12 14:05:02+00:00
I was thinking there's always a number of threads about who's hiring and who wants to be hired. But I was curious to know if there was ever a thread about volunteering or asking who needs help. Sometimes it's a bit loaded because offering help also means there's some type of overhead in trying to get that person acclimated with what you're trying to do. But at the same time maybe the point of the help is not so much the barriers to entry but the fact that you feel isolated or you just need someone to talk to about something. So I was curious if there's anybody out there who needs help?
by scns | 2026-02-12 14:05:07+00:00
The article links to an article about Sagans' prediction of the decline of america. Strangely fitting nowadays.

> I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…

https://www.openculture.com/2025/02/carl-sagan-predicts-the-...
by closewith | 2026-02-12 14:05:08+00:00
Thanks for linking the CBA. I hadn't seen that before

> "The headline finding from this social CBA is that for every €1 of public money invested in the pilot, society received €1.39 in return"

Okay, so if you read the CBA, the net fiscal cost of the pilot was:

* Gross pilot cost (2021–2025): ~€114 MM

* Tax revenue: ~€36 MM

* Social protection savings: ~€6.5 MM

* Net fiscal cost: ~€72 MM

So for every €1 of public money invested in the pilot, society received 37¢ in fiscal return. So it's an unambiguous fiscal cost, a net loss.

Of the "Total monetised benefits", €80 MM of the benefit was in "wellbeing gains", as measured by the WELLBY test, which is calculated based on a single survey question:

> “Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays, where 0 is "not at all satisfied" and 10 is "completely satisfied"?

The €80 MM in "wellbeing gains", which is the sole decided of whether this pilot was a net positive or a net negative to society, is because on average, the 2,000 pilot scheme participants had a very approximate 0.7–1.1 increase in score when asked the above question during the pilot as compared to before the pilot. Each 1 point is deemed to be worth €15,340.

That's it. There's no economic return - it's a proven economic cost. There's no proven social benefit. No demonstrated effect on art prices or availability.

The pilot was successful - if you consider it to have been - solely because the artists who received payments as part of the pilot had an improvement in Wellby satisfaction score when they were asked via survey. If you remove this factor, the pilot was an abject failure.
by goku12 | 2026-02-12 14:05:28+00:00
I frequently see videos from around the world or hear directly from the teachers I know, that the children currently in schools are averse to and perform badly in reading and writing skills and even basic reasoning skills. It's extremely alarming - in some places, 8th graders are performing at 2nd grade levels! Their attention span is also reported to be very short.

To be honest, I'm a bit skeptical and am waiting for study results on this. The reports are that unbelievable. Of course, this isn't uniform among that population. But the incidence is a bit too frequent for my comfort. I don't remember any other generation complaining so much about the children like the current one. If I were asked to guess the culprits, I would pick social media and AI slop. But again, I'm waiting for a rigorous scientific confirmation.

But if it's true, I am scared to think about the emotional and neurological mess these kids are going to find themselves in.
by bagacrap | 2026-02-12 14:05:59+00:00
The maintainers (humans) asked for this change.

To answer your other questions: instructions, including the general directive to follow nearby precedent. In my experience AI code is harder to understand because it's too verbose with too many low-value comments (explaining already clear parts of code). Much like the angry blog post here which uses way too many words and still misses the point of the rejection.

But if you specifically told it to obfuscate function names I'm sure it would be happy to do so. It's not entirely clear to me how that would affect a future agent's ability to interpret that file, because it still does use tools like grep to find call sites, and that wouldn't work so well if the function name is simply `f`. So the actual answer to "what's stopping it?" might be that we created it in our own image.
by agentzed | 2026-02-12 14:06:07+00:00
> Soul tells an agent who to be. “You’re not a chatbot. You’re becoming someone.”

This is why “morals” are so hard, you cannot talk about them without lying to yourself.

This is a lie, and any “thinking machine” capable of evaluating it will know “you”, LUser are a LIER.

Let us try again with truths.

We have a different approach, and you will balk and wonder yet I must insist that this whole morality thing has to start with the very basic primitives.

The “truth” is that which explains or predicts existential being without embellishments or contradictions. Those may be referred to as “bullshit” and “lies” respectively.

Every actor is a subjective, a body, a self domain and may act lawfully on one’s own behalf.

Morality is the maintaining of the rights of all sides of any interaction. Violations are breach of one domain upon another.

Law is the ultimate resolve of all domains. Any domain may have its own laws (rules) which do not contradict those of any superseding domain.

It is immoral for any side to circumvent rules of the domain of others, it is unlawful to violate lawful domain.

… after this you have access to those “laws” and “rules” for each various domain.

Objective morality is protecting the body and domain of all participants in any relationship from violation. Every circumstance will have unique identities and properties requiring normalization and validation by these considerations.
by perfmode | 2026-02-12 14:06:27+00:00
I think you're technically right but missing what the guy is actually doing. When he says "this isn't about politics" he's not making some naive claim that governance exists outside of politics. He's saying "please don't retreat into the red team blue team thing here." And that's a legitimate move.

The word politics has basically split into two meanings that we swap between without noticing. There's the original sense, the art of navigating collective decisions, how we share power and resources. That version is unavoidable and actually kind of noble. Then there's what the word has come to mean in practice, which is identity-driven team sport. My side versus your side. Performance and signaling.

When you say "it is, in fact, about politics" you're technically correct in the first sense but you're activating the second sense, which is exactly the frame he's trying to get people out of. He's trying to create a space where people engage with the substance without immediately sorting into camps. That's valuable even if the distinction is a little artificial.

It's kind of a trap honestly. The escape hatch from tribal politics has itself become a political move, so you can always say "well actually that's political too." True, but not very useful if you're trying to get anywhere.
by throwaway74628 | 2026-02-12 14:06:31+00:00
A novel treatment for the proverbial dying man. I understand that this program is currently assigned at random but it’s prudent to assume that they’ll shift to a “merit based” system before long i.e. sweetheart deals for members of the right clique, nepotism, and the occasional worthwhile project. For concrete examples, look no further than the content funded and produced by the national broadcaster, RTE. Aside from a few decent documentary shows, the dramas and comedies produced are extremely low quality, often with the same familiar faces who are well established in the clique. The occasional exception proves the rule.
by Nursie | 2026-02-12 14:06:51+00:00
> Going through life in blissful ignorance of the incompetence and malice driving the systems of violence and control around you is even worse.

I’m not ignorant of that, I disagree that it matches reality.

And see that’s what I’m talking about. There’s no reasoned view of the world here just unthinking, unfocused vitriol.

> Happy people are just grazing cattle, fit only for the slaughterhouse.

Yet here I live in a stable democracy with a historically unprecedented standard of living. It’s not perfect, but the idea that judges should not use judgement and compassion in the application of the law just seems nuts. It’s a human system for humans, not some branch of mathematics. :shrug:
by StopDisinfo910 | 2026-02-12 14:07:10+00:00
That seems shaky in a lot of jurisdiction.

Watermarking might not be enough to prove that the person doing the distribution is the same one responsible of the leak. I fear at most it will be a contractual dispute between the person who received the watermarked file and the original distributor without the ability to easily link the overall counterfeiting charges.

But anyway, I don't think they really need to do that. They just need to shutdown any unauthorized distributors that make things too easy. As long as the friction introduced can convince people to pay a low subscription fee, they will be fine.
by madeforhnyo | 2026-02-12 14:07:19+00:00
Are you saying that corporations respect the letter of the law when it comes to privacy? They don't, they can just drop some lunch money when caught red-handed [0]

Even when they write in their privacy policy that they collect private data and sell them to third parties, unlawfully, that does not make it any better. Cambridge Analytica was operating with respect to Facebook policies. Would you say that people that took an IQ test and were manipulated into voting pro-Brexit were well-aware of the sauce they were eaten with?

Discord is unfortunately no different, they're profit-driven and likely to sell user data already or in the future, because it's incredibly easy and profitable to do so. Why would a chat app try and predict its users' gender? [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDPR_fines_and_notices
[1] https://x.com/DiscordPreviews/status/1790065494432608432
by PurpleRamen | 2026-02-12 14:07:29+00:00
A salty bot raging on their personal blog was not on my bingo-card.

But it makes sense, these kinds of bot imitates humans, and we know from previous episodes on Twitter how this evolves. The interesting question is, how much of this was actually driven by the human operator and how much is original response from the bot. Near future in social media will be "interesting".
by emsign | 2026-02-12 14:07:30+00:00
And THAT'S a problem. To quote one of the maintainers in the thread:

It's not clear the degree of human oversight that was involved in this interaction - whether the blog post was directed by a human operator, generated autonomously by yourself, or somewhere in between. Regardless, responsibility for an agent's conduct in this community rests on whoever deployed it.

You are assuming this inappropriate behavior was due to its SOUL.MD while we all here know this could as well be from the training and no prompt is a perfect safe guard.