MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by latexr | 2026-02-20 10:31:02+00:00
It seems to me the bot’s operator feels zero remorse and will absolutely do this again.

> I kind of framed this internally as a kind of social experiment

Remember when that was the excuse du jour? Followed shortly by “it’s just a prank, bro”. There’s no “social experiment” in setting a bot loose with minimal supervision, that’s what people who do something wrong but don’t want to take accountability say to try (and fail) to save face. It’s so obvious how they use “kind of” twice to obfuscate.

> I’m sure the mob expects more

And here’s the proof. This person isn’t sorry. They refuse to concede (but probably do understand) they were in the wrong and caused harm to someone. There’s no real apology anywhere. To them, they’re the victim for being called out for their actions.
by rabf | 2026-02-20 10:31:07+00:00
I use GIMP and FreeCAD quite often and find them very powerful programs, but maybe I'm some sort of genius? I think where these programs don't do well is among the crowd who expect to be able to just click around an advanced piece of software and somehow it just works to get things done! For basic apps this is a reasonable expectation, but CAD is not a simple process.

PS: I've still not managed to learn Blender, not put enough hours in, it is a hugely complex beast of a program that basically requires keyboard shortcut use imho. That interface (beautiful as it is) has so many options that even if I know what I'm looking for I can't find it!
by jeanloolz | 2026-02-20 10:31:41+00:00
You may pay to ChatGPT, but sooner or later you will become their product too. All the conversations you had or will have will be turned into signals to match you with products from advertisers, maybe not directly in the conversation with them, but anywhere else. It's not a mater of if, but looking at the pace things are going, and how financially pressured openai is, it's only a matter of time that their conversations with them will be turned into profit in some way or another, they basically have no choice financially.
by locknitpicker | 2026-02-20 10:32:10+00:00
> It’s a clear way to project soft power: make sure your message and culture can get through.

You're talking about an administration that actively tries to censor candidates of opposition candidates through both state regulatory institutions such as the FCC and business collusion, a typical play out of the fascist playbook with state and oligarchs colluding to strong arm their political goals.

It's also the same administration who is actively involved in supporting other dictatorial regimes and destabilize Europe, including with very explicit and overt threats of war of invasion to annex territories.

It's also the same administration that is clearly a puppet administration controlled by another totalitarian regime - Russia.

There is no soft power in this stunt. Only further self-destructive actions to further kill the US's relevance as an European ally.
by mukulmunjal | 2026-02-20 10:32:25+00:00
Hi HN,

We recently crossed our first 100 active users at InterviewFlowAI. Getting here was significantly harder than I originally expected. Looking back, I wasted months of engineering and marketing effort going down the wrong paths.

If I were starting over today, here is the technical and business reality check I wish I had:

Traction over pitch decks: We spent a lot of time prepping for a $1.5M seed round before we had real, consistent usage. Validate your idea by fighting for those first 100 users first. Real traction flips the dynamic of investor meetings entirely.

Stop over-engineering the landing page: As technical founders, we want to build everything custom. Do not build your marketing site from scratch. Study the structure of SaaS tools you admire, adapt their section layouts, and move on to the actual product.

Distribution requires daily work: Writing code is only half the battle. You have to publish online daily. Pick your channel (Reddit, X, LinkedIn, or an SEO blog) and stay consistent to get in front of your target audience.

Give away the hard stuff first: Manual resume screening is fundamentally broken. We built the objective AI engine we wished we had and kept it completely free for a limited time. That raw usage gave us the edge cases, feedback, and testimonials we needed to confidently introduce our $299 and $499 monthly enterprise plans.

The first five minutes dictate churn: Your onboarding is a promise. We realized we had to put a massive amount of effort into those initial screens so hiring managers could experience the AI's value immediately.

Ship smaller pieces faster: Maintain an MVP mindset for every feature. We pushed out tools like our "smart screening questions" quickly just to see how users interacted with them, then used that telemetry to improve the logic.

Incumbents are a target, not a wall: Just because massive legacy ATS platforms exist does not mean you cannot compete. They are often slow and bloated. Focus strictly on execution. We simply aimed to build a better, unbiased scoring engine.

Co-founder alignment is your biggest moat: Having a technical co-founder like Tushar who matches your ambition is the single greatest advantage. The emotional and technical workload is too heavy to carry alone.

Do things that do not scale: Earning those first paying customers is an absolute grind. You have to do the manual, unscalable work to get them onboarded.

Building a solid product ultimately comes down to ignoring your own assumptions and obsessing over what your users actually need.

Happy to answer any questions about our stack, how we transitioned to paid tiers, or the resume parsing logic.
by jbstack | 2026-02-20 10:33:37+00:00
I'm not sure I can answer the first question, because I can reach the T just fine with my other finger on A and without contorting my wrist. Also, not that it changes my point, but I don't conform to a rigid version of the home-row rule or the standard touch-typing method, and I think that's how I achieve faster typing speeds than most. My hands dance around the keyboard and each movement is relative to where my fingers were on the last movement, while keeping the home row as a base. For example, in the standard method you'd use the right index finger for both Y and U. For me, if I've just typed a Y, I'll use the second finger to type U because that's more natural than re-using the index finger in different positions.

Also, just to be clear, I wasn't arguing that regular and split are the same. I have both types of keyboards and I'm planning to switch to split once I've mastered a new keyboard layout. My point was only in support of the original comment; namely, that that drawing is misleading.
by polyglotfacto | 2026-02-20 10:33:43+00:00
> its value comes from fulfilling its requirements.

The requirements will have to come from somewhere, and they will have to be quite precise although probably higher-level than code written today. You're talking about just a new kind of software engineer. The kind of stuff described at https://martin.kleppmann.com/2025/12/08/ai-formal-verificati... (note the "the challenge will move to correctly defining the specification")

Unless what you have in mind is some sort of Moltbook add-on that the bots would write for themselves.

I'm talking software providing value to humans.
by danlitt | 2026-02-20 10:33:44+00:00
I didn't say that they weren't. Hundreds of people were arrested for opposing the proscription of Palestine Action. The UK's defence of free expression is not great.

What I did say is that the US's position is not as a defender of free speech either (and as Russia is not a defender of free trade). They have particular speech they like to promote (the KKK, stormfront) and particular speech they like to suppress (criticism of war crimes, books about being trans). Draw whatever conclusions you like from that.
by bruce343434 | 2026-02-20 10:33:48+00:00
As a developer who spent a couple months developing a microservice using aws lambda functions:

it SUCKS. There's no interactive debugging. Deploy for a minute or 5 depending on the changes, then trigger the lambda, wait another 5 minutes for all the logs to show up. Then proceed with printf/stack trace debugging.

For reasons that I forgot, locally running the lambda code on my dev box was not applicable. Locally deploying the cloud environment neither.

I wasn't around for the era but I imagine it's like working on an ancient mainframe with long compile times and a very slow printer.
by leoedin | 2026-02-20 10:34:19+00:00
I think we are. There's definitely been an uptick in "show HN" type posts with quite impressively complex apps that one person developed in a few weeks.

From my own experience, the problem is that AI slows down a lot as the scale grows. It's very quick to add extra views to a frontend, but struggles a lot more in making wide reaching refactors. So it's very easy to start a project, but after a while your progress slows significantly.

But given I've developed 2 pretty functional full stack applications in the last 3 months, which I definitely wouldn't have done without AI assistance, I think it's a fair assumption that lots of other people are doing the same. So there is almost certainly a lot more software being produced than there was before.
by gverrilla | 2026-02-20 10:34:32+00:00
Let me be clear: he has all the right to feel bad about it, I'm not questioning that at all. But only IF IT'S TRUE, which we don't know for a fact - at all. Clearly that's a guy without a clear scientific mindset, because he didn't even question his basic premises at all (particularly on the first post). Also it's clear his using this as an opportunity to self-promote.
by jacoka | 2026-02-20 10:34:51+00:00
A few implementation notes:

– It uses Cloudflare’s official GraphQL API
– The API token never leaves your browser (stored in localStorage)
– Minimum required permission: R2 read-only analytics

I built this because I was close to the free Class B limit and couldn’t easily see daily burn rate.

Happy to open-source it if there’s interest.
by michaelteter | 2026-02-20 10:34:56+00:00
It really doesn't matter what I say or what evidence I present to you.

There is ample... overwhelming numbers of on the ground video of non-violent protestors being assaulted by armed, masked men who are jacked up on false authority. They harm people, they even shoot people, and they lie about it.

The upper administration responds to these events within minutes, naming the harmed citizens as "domestic terrorists". Later, when bodycam and bystander videos are released, this is disproven. Time and time again.

To be very, very clear: anyone not physically attacking an authority figure but who may be protesting, making videos, or yelling, is not a terrorist. That is an observer or a protester.
by sensanaty | 2026-02-20 10:35:33+00:00
I work for one of those enterprises with lots of people trying out AI (thankfully leadership is actually sane, no mandates that you have to use it, just giving devs access to experiment with the tools and see what happens). Lots of people trying it out in earnest, lots of newsletters about new techniques and all that kinda stuff. Lots of people too, so there's all sorts of opinions from very excited to completely indifferent.

Precisely 0 projects are making it out any faster or (IMO more importantly) better. We have a PR review bot clogging up our PRs with fucking useless comments, rewriting the PR descriptions in obnoxious ways, that basically everyone hates and is getting shut off soon. From an actual productivity POV, people are just using it for a quick demo or proof of concept here and there before actually building the proper thing manually as before. And we have all the latest and greatest techniques, all the AGENTS.mds and tool calling and MCP integrations and unlimited access to every model we care to have access to and all the other bullshit that OpenAI et al are trying to shove on people.

It's not for a lack of trying, plenty of people are trying to make any part of it work, even if it's just to handle the truly small stuff that would take 5 minutes of work but is just tedious and small enough to be annoying to pick up. It's just not happening, even with extremely simple tasks (that IMO would be better off with a dedicated, small deterministic script) we still need human overview because it often shits the bed regardless, so the effort required to review things is equal or often greater than just doing the damn ticket yourself.

My personal favorite failure is when the transcript bots just... Don't transcript random chunks of the conversation, which can often lead to more confusion than if we just didn't have anything transcribed. We've turned off the transcript and summarization bots, because we've found 9/10 times they're actively detrimental to our planning and lead us down bad paths.
by sylens | 2026-02-20 10:35:55+00:00
The part about account teams for AWS and GCP is very true in my experience. I could tell my AWS account team that I was hungry and they would offer to bring me a bagel in an hour. My GCP account team no-shows our cadence calls and somehow forgets the one question I ask them in the intervening time between our calls, which means each month I get to re-explain the issue as they pretend to escalate it again.
by BoorishBears | 2026-02-20 10:36:11+00:00
Hetzner is a very particular product. They openly cop to being "overly cautious" with even letting people open accounts because they're playing with razor thin margins: I wouldn't engage with an organization like that for serious production workloads.

At least, where "serious" is defined as making enough money that paying AWS $200 a month for $20 a month worth of compute is worth it in exchange for an actual SLA*, paid support, and knowing that even if you drop of the face of the Earth, the account will probably run unfunded months before your users even notice.

I've been bitten by using "quirky" tier-3 providers for savings on projects that really should have just ate the cost of a bigger provider.

(* Yes an SLA is not a magic uptime guarantee, but it creates an expectation which is a lot better than nothing.)
by Gareth321 | 2026-02-20 10:36:21+00:00
The story is widely reported:

https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/irishman-arrested-for-...

https://www.irishmirror.ie/news/irish-news/irishman-arrested...

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/08/03/memes-police-matter...

https://www.hrla.org.au/uk_man_arrested_for_social_media_mem...

Is this normally how you evade things which make you uncomfortable? Attacking the source?
by michaelteter | 2026-02-20 10:36:58+00:00
Learn from him in what way? He communicated articulately in grammatically correct, full sentences in the past. Now he rambles nearly incoherently.

What are we to learn from this? That his mental state has deteriorated? That much is obvious. Even ignoring all other evidence, it is utterly clear that he is a fraction of the communicator that he once was.
by pgebski | 2026-02-20 10:37:51+00:00
Hey HN,

I built HushWork — a minimalist workspace that combines a focus timer, layerable ambient soundscapes, and a distraction-free writing pad into a single browser tab.

Why I built it: I kept juggling between a Pomodoro app, a white noise site, and a notes app every time I wanted to get into deep work. I wanted one calm, unified
space that doesn't nag me with metrics or require an account.

How it works:
- Focus timer — Pomodoro, deep work (50/10), or custom presets with cycle tracking. Uses timestamp-based tracking instead of setInterval, so it survives browser tab
throttling and page refreshes without drifting.
- Ambient sounds — Layer rain, ocean, wind, thunder, and more with individual volume controls. All served from CDN for instant playback.
- Writing pad — Auto-saves to IndexedDB with 1s debounce. No formatting clutter, just text.
- Gentle nudges — Optional reminders for hydration, posture, and breathing with three tones: supportive, factual, or playful.

Technical details:
- Next.js + React 19 + TypeScript, Tailwind CSS
- Also ships as a Chrome extension (Manifest V3, built with Vite)
- Offline-first — everything runs locally via IndexedDB. No account required.
- Optional Pro tier adds cloud sync (Supabase), extra sounds, and themes — but core functionality is fully free
- 12 color themes with atmospheric backgrounds, dark/light modes

Privacy-first: Your data stays in your browser by default. No tracking beyond privacy-friendly Plausible analytics. No sign-up walls.

The timestamp-based timer was the most interesting technical challenge — browsers aggressively throttle setInterval in background tabs, so I store the real start time
and always compute elapsed from Date.now(). Simple in hindsight, but it makes the timer actually reliable.

Would love feedback from the HN community. What focus tools do you use, and what's missing from them?
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-20 10:38:03+00:00
> accused Scott of hypocrisy, discrimination, prejudice, insecurity, ego, and gatekeeping.

It was also a transparent confabulation - the accusations were clearly inaccurate and misguided but they were made honestly and sincerely, as an attempt to "seek justice" after witnessing perceived harm. Usually we don't call such behavior "shaming" and "bullying", we excuse it and describe it simply as trying one's best to do the right thing.
by usrnm | 2026-02-20 10:38:24+00:00
In my opinion, it's the initialization part of RAII which is really powerful and still missing from most other languages. When implemented properly, RAII completely eliminates a whole class of bugs related to uninitialized or partially initialized objects: if all initialization happens during construction, then you either have a fully initialized correct object, or you exit via an exception, no third state. Additionaly, tying resources to constructors makes the correct order of freeing these resources automatic. If you consume all your dependencies during construction, then destructors just walk the dependency graph in the correct order without you even thinking about it. Agreed, that writing your code like this requires some getting used to and isn't even always possible, but it's still a very powerful idea that goes beyond simple automatic destruction
by piltdownman | 2026-02-20 10:39:05+00:00
I mean no one is listening to an audiobook of an Eternal Golden Braid - even if one existed it couldn't lead to an equivalent outcome compared to reading it. Let's not even get started on the impact on literary devices like Wordplay and Neologisms.

There doesn't need to be an implicit dig; audiobooks are explicitly a different medium, and in the Marshall McLuhan sense obviously thus impact comprehension, retention, and the overall grok.
by marginalia_nu | 2026-02-20 10:39:05+00:00
Seems like something that would be well received if one and exactly one guy was doing it, and annoying as hell when 35 additional jabronis started to run the same type of script, like what you see with the oh-so-helpful AI PRs on github that make random ass changes nobody asked for.

Especially given we already have pretty good spell checkers, and have had for way over a decade.
by deaux | 2026-02-20 10:39:42+00:00
If you want to throw your money into a pit, there's a lot of alternative pits available out there. Happy to share my bank account, then at least one of us gets use out of it.

> You can add email/password and passkeys, but removing social logins entirely is a conversion killer. Every one of those auth flows hits American servers. The silver lining: Hanko, a German identity provider, handles the auth layer itself, so at least your user management and session handling stay in Europe, even if the OAuth flow touches Google or Apple.

You can at least put "Sign in with Spotify" first before Apple/Google - they have social login. I've even seen apps that have nothing to do with music offer it as an option.
by ekusiadadus | 2026-02-20 10:39:45+00:00
I've been working on multi-agent path finding (MAPF) for warehouse robotics, so when Amazon published the DeepFleet paper (arXiv, Aug 2025), I spent
considerable time dissecting it.

Four things I found most interesting:

1. The 97M-parameter Robot-Centric model beat the 840M and 900M alternatives. Local interaction propagation matters more than global context — a finding that aligns with what we see in
classical MAPF (PIBT, LaCAM).

2. Image-based representations catastrophically failed (186% congestion delay error). You cannot represent a robot as a single pixel and expect to capture fleet interactions.

3. The 13M-parameter Graph-Floor model was surprisingly competitive. This suggests the warehouse's graph topology itself is the binding constraint on coordination quality.

4. The scaling laws section experimentally confirms power-law behavior over two orders of magnitude — giving substance to the "improves over time" claim.

I also tried to translate the technical findings into economic terms using Little's Law: a 10% travel time reduction in a 1,000-robot warehouse is equivalent to ~100 fewer robots
($1.3M/year).

I build Rovnou (https://rovnou.com), which does MAPF-based fleet coordination for non-Amazon warehouses. The DeepFleet paper validates many design choices we've made (event-driven, local
context, graph-first), while also showing where foundation models may eventually surpass classical solvers.

Happy to discuss the architecture tradeoffs, MAPF vs. learned approaches, or practical deployment challenges.
by wvh | 2026-02-20 10:39:56+00:00
Many European countries have decent authentication, banking and payment system alternatives or even innovative solutions. I think, like usually, it's just a problem to break out of national or regional circles into something pan-European.

A lot of people seem to agree that relying on a handful of too powerful American companies, especially in the ad and social media space, is a terrible idea and running foul of privacy requirements. Remains to be seen if some larger alternatives manage to pop up though. The European landscape is pretty fragmented.
by mort96 | 2026-02-20 10:41:02+00:00
The forward goto cleanup pattern is not something "wrong" that was done to "avoid typing". Goto cleanup is the only reasonable way I know to semi-reliably clean up resources in C, and is widely used among most of the large C code bases out there. It's the main way resource cleanup is done in Linux.

By putting all the cleanup code at the end of the function after a cleanup label, you have reduced the complexity of resource management: you have one place where the resource is acquired, and one place where the resource is freed. This is actually manageable. Before you return, you check every resource you might have acquired, and if your handle (pointer, file descriptor, PID, whatever) is not in its null state (null pointer, -1, whatever), you call the free function.

By comparison, if you try to put the correct cleanup functions at every exit point, the problem explodes in complexity. Whereas correctly adding a new resource using the 'goto cleanup' pattern requires adding a single 'if (my_resource is not its null value) { cleanup(my_resource) }' at the end of the function, correctly adding a new resource using the 'cleanup at every exit point' pattern requires going through every single exit point in the function, considering whether or not the resource will be acquired at that time, and if it is, adding the cleanup code. Adding a new exit point similarly requires going through all resources used by the function and determining which ones need to be cleaned up.

C is hard enough as it is to get right when you only need to remember to clean up resources in one place. It gets infinitely harder when you need to match up cleanup code with returns.