MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by walletdrainer | 2026-02-28 15:15:53+00:00
>I'd pick North Korea over Ukraine right now because it's a lot easier to live in a dictatorship than an active war zone

You can live a perfectly normal life in Kiev. It’s not exactly an active war zone, you see luxury cars worth hundreds of thousands of dollars on every corner. You can buy bottles of Petrus in 24 hour supermarkets and eat decent food at countless fancy restaurants.

Goodwine in Kiev will also put US luxury grocers to shame. Ukraine might be at war, but the quality of life is hardly bad.
by eviks | 2026-02-28 15:16:06+00:00
What a coincidence, was just looking for a replacement of Simplenote!

With hundreds of note taking apps coming and going, is there any single performant cross-platform non-Electron app with great conflict resolution for simple notes? Just to be more useful than an overpowered code editor + a file cloud?

Checked just 2 of these conditions here (native Windows and macOS and some iOS startup benchmarks) and there is literally not a single app!!! (to be fair, not every app is likely tested, but even without those it's 6 apps)

https://noteapps.info/features?group=performance
by justonceokay | 2026-02-28 15:16:15+00:00
I have twice encountered a phone tree AI agent saying my problem could not be solved and then ending the call. One was for PayPal fraud and the other was for closing an unused bank account.

For right now my trick is to say I have a problem that is more recognizable and mundane to the ai (i .e. lie) and then when I finally get the human just say “oh that was a bunch of hooey here’s what I’m trying to do”. For PayPal that involved asking for help with a business tax that did not exist. For my bank it involved asking to /open/ a new account. Obviously th AI wants to help me open an account, even if my intention is to close one.

That will only work for so long but it’s something
by AreShoesFeet000 | 2026-02-28 15:16:25+00:00
Very nice piece of text. For me it’s the fact that the book is always there and no amount of pages can be too much for me to gather something from rereading a part of the book that leads to where I left off. In a way I think we’re also past the point of bookmarking anything in our lives. Culture after all is just the reinforcement of the same idea.
by zdw | 2026-02-28 15:17:17+00:00
I can generally re-find my place in books, but years ago I acquired a stack of orange punch cards from a university library that they were giving away as scrap paper. These make great bookmarks and also interesting historical conversation pieces if someone notices/recognizes them.

I think the previous use for the punchards to have one for each book and scan them on checkout/checkin (maybe this predated barcodes?)
by kccqzy | 2026-02-28 15:17:20+00:00
Even before AI, I’ve witnessed at Google plenty of L6 and L7 software engineers atrophy. They stop writing code, start reviewing code, until they find that their code reviews catch fewer issues than a junior engineer’s reviews. They have become accustomed to thinking only at a high-level, and when met with low-level details they can’t tell good from bad any more. Their coding skills, both reading and writing, have atrophied.
by jacquesm | 2026-02-28 15:17:50+00:00
Yes, I know, but thank you for the mention. The thing to look for is slow or fast response and maximum leakage current. In industrial settings those are used all the time for slow starting motors and other heavy consumers. The reason I didn't do it is because I only had to make a couple of welds and a triple breaker is 150,- euros or so, so I had to redo a bunch of welds and I didn't have to wait 24 hours to get it.

But if this was a regular thing then I would definitely replace the breaker.
by nlz | 2026-02-28 15:18:10+00:00
Author here. I've been working with Rust more recently, and thinking through its error handling ecosystem led me down a rabbit hole comparing it to what I'd used before — C, Go, exceptions, and Google's Absl Status. The post ended up being a broader survey of error handling principles across languages and organizations than I originally planned.
Looking forward to input — I'd love to hear what your experiences with error handling have been like, especially across different languages or at scale.
by heartbreak | 2026-02-28 15:18:16+00:00
> Each time you "compile" your prompt into a program, LLMs spit up something a little bit different. How is it a good thing?

Because that’s not how it works. How can we have a discussion about this topic if we don’t have a mutual understanding of how the tools even work?

The code is not replaced by English prompts. The code still exists.
by nostrademons | 2026-02-28 15:18:16+00:00
In typical jury trials, the jury is instructed that any terms not defined in the relevant statutes are to have their common-sense, ordinary meanings as understood by the jury. The jury is usually also selected to be full of reasonable, moderate people, and folks who are overly pedantic usually get excused during voir dire.

Do you really think a pool of 12 people off the street is going to consider an embedded system, wi-fi router, or traffic light as an "operating system" under this law? Particularly since they don't even have accounts or users as a common-sense member of the public would understand them?
by otterley | 2026-02-28 15:18:27+00:00
> a company acting in a way that the Department of War perceives as benefiting enemy states could certainly be a justification for declaring a supply chain risk.

What’s the difference between a company not building something that’s fit for purpose for fighting a war (like a nursery refusing to build land mines), and thus not being a qualified supplier to the Government for conducting military operations, vs. being tarred with the “supply chain risk” brush? The former seems uncontroversial; the latter seems petty and retaliatory. “Supply chain risk” designations are for companies that you would do business with but might be compromised by the enemy, like when a supplier agrees to provide the DoW grenades, but the grenades could be (or were) intentionally defective and detonate prematurely in the soldier’s hand.

Besides, as an Israeli, imagine a world in which the manufacturers of Zyklon B refused to sell Hitler their product for the purposes of gassing human beings. It might not have prevented the Holocaust, but at least maybe impeded it a little.

Apropos to this controversy, this story appeared yesterday—after 31 years following the Balkan wars, Croatia finally eliminated the last land mine: https://glashrvatske.hrt.hr/en/domestic/croatia-declared-fre...
by brandonb | 2026-02-28 15:18:41+00:00
(OP) This was fun to write.

The most surprising thing I learned that coconut milk is a lot less healthy than I would have guessed (high in lauric acid).

I had always heard that dark chocolate was heart healthy, in spite of being high in saturated fat. In addition to the effect of antioxidants, the stearic acid in dark chocolate quickly converted by your liver into oleic acid (a monounsaturated fat).
by bojan | 2026-02-28 15:18:57+00:00
Not just Hitler.

There are more recent examples in Europe, like Putin, Orban and Vucic. All of them got elected fairly, and all of them engaged in the process of slowly but surely breaking democratic institutions and checks and balances down. The guidebook is actually exactly the same. Putin is now 25 years in power, Orban 16 years and Vucic 14 years.

You could say that those Eastern European democracies were fragile to begin with, but what MAGA is so far very much successfully doing is fully matching the existing proven guidebook.

If Polymarket were legal in my country I'd actually consider betting on it.
by zabzonk | 2026-02-28 15:19:17+00:00
Oh, I don't know. I quite like radioactivity. My Dad (RAF bomber pilot) had a pilots watch with radium luminous dials. I always fancied getting it after his death, about 12 years ago, but nobody could find it - my brothers denied all knowledge, and I have absolutely no reason to doubt them. So it must be somewhere irradiating the roaches that will become our inevitable successors.
by Doublon | 2026-02-28 15:19:49+00:00
I'd like to try a pattern where agents only have access to read-only tools. They can read you emails, read your notes, read your texts, maybe even browse the internet with only GET requests...

But any action with side-effects ends up in a Tasks list, completely isolated. The agent can't send an email, they don't have such a tool. But they can prepare a reply and put it in the tasks list. Then I proof-read and approve/send myself.

If there anything like that available for *Claws?
by guerrilla | 2026-02-28 15:19:50+00:00
> It made sense for iran to try to negotiate with the US because the alternative was a war they had no chance to win.

They have no chance of winning no matter what. At least inflict some damage on your enemy while you die like Hamas chose (although I disagree with the fact that they chose that for a lot of innocent people too.)

The US isn't ever going to leave anyone, let alone Iran, alone. The options are a) fight and cease to exist and b) don't fight and cease to exist.
by mjhagen | 2026-02-28 15:20:24+00:00
It's been my go-to since 2009! That's longer than I had thought. It just did what it said on the sticker and has always been unobtrusive and respectful of the user when adding a few features every now and then. Thankful to have been able to use it for so long and without it getting enshitified like almost everything else.
by vergessenmir | 2026-02-28 15:20:40+00:00
If you don't have the experience you can't provide it with stylistic guidance, or idiomatic patterns or provide examples to direct it.

This leads to the idea that LLMs with existing languages can't really learn new idiomatic patterns.

For new engineers I think new paradigms will emerge that invalidate the need to know the current set of design patterns and idioms. Look at the resurgence of unit tests or the new interests in verification systems.
by AreShoesFeet000 | 2026-02-28 15:20:59+00:00
There’s also the other way around. Semantic AI is a good chunk of meat, but it can only be useful as it’s harnessed properly with a nice set of bones. I think that symbolic AI will make a come back eventually. Not as an accelerator of what’s already been done in the Industry, but as the actual revolution.

And don’t be naive to think that there aren’t sophisticated symbolic handling mechanisms being implemented in the training of the models by Big Tech. Not even baby soap is truly neutral.
by the__alchemist | 2026-02-28 15:21:12+00:00
The opening sections including graphs do not match my experience. I think they only apply to certain workflows which can be described as "work we have to do because software has a history of poor integration". I.e. repeating solved problems.

Claude will, when given a task off the beaten track, churn through tokens for a while, then produce a completely incorrect answer. (Most recent anecdote: fixing a barostat in an MD sim)

Specifically: How does Spotify, a music streaming service, improve due to AI agents producing code all night? What is improving or being fixed which needs that much abstract code and problem solving? I am guessing the AI code is just building more messy architecture on top of the messy architecture which is causing so much work to be generated.
by urav | 2026-02-28 15:21:25+00:00
Appreciate this! and yeah the will wright talk is exactly what I was leaning into.

Actually posted this on X 2 weeks ago, hosted the werld observatory public, and had gemini stream a new chapter of the story in natural language every 10,000 ticks - so it felt like reading through a david attenburgh novel of werld being born.

Most interesting thing from the last run was definitely the language and the behaviours, they decoding what they were actually saying was a difficult one, and noticing them group within their diverged species.

Up next, i want to get the storytelling side up and running too - kept running out of storage, and cloudflare playing up as usual - maybe get gemini to visualise each chapter - and get an upgraded interface for the werld observatory.

If you want to check out my previous attempt at streaming the story line - it's still on my X - https://x.com/im_urav?s=21&t=6Si-w-DvNJC7RfvSz2Aw-w
by Towaway69 | 2026-02-28 15:21:35+00:00
> I’m not anti-AI, I like it a lot. I’m addicted to prompting, I get high from it.

I would suggest leaving the keyboard, going outside and getting some real highs. Perhaps also leave behind all your technology and try to experience a non-connected life.

What is the world coming to when folks get a high from prompting a complex algorithm.

Oh well, it probably proves that “human intelligence” isn’t that complex. It seems fairly simple to simulate.
by PeterWhittaker | 2026-02-28 15:21:39+00:00
I enjoyed the article, though I do have to pick nits with:

> Software used to be deterministic

Ah, someone fortunate enough to have never coded a heisenbug or trip over UB of various causes.

I've written plenty of well structured, well thought out mostly-deterministic software, then spent hours or days figuring what oversight summoned the gremlins.

(There is one low priority bug I've occasionally returned to over the last two-three years in case experience and back-burner musing may result in insight. Nope. Use gcc, no bug, use clang, bug, always, regardless of O level, debug level, etc. Everything else, all of it far more complex, works 100% reliably, it's just that one display update that fails.)

(It occurs to me that that is a bad example, because it IS deterministic, but none of us can pinpoint the "determiner".)
by iamcalledrob | 2026-02-28 15:21:41+00:00
I'd love to have my system be declared in code, so I can replicate the same environment across a laptop and a desktop with minimal drift.

So same OS, users, packages, flatpaks etc. And a mostly synced home dir too.

Is NixOS the only viable way to do this? I don't like the path mangling that Nix introduces.

It seems like an immutable distro customized via a Containerfile could work too? Except rebooting/reimagine for every change sounds tedious as hell.
by reliabilityguy | 2026-02-28 15:21:47+00:00
> People saying that we can't bomb our way into regime change apparently didn't follow the protests and massacres very closely a couple months ago. Iranians were begging for help so that they could topple the regime.

Of course people didn’t follow. Did you see any major news outlet doing live coverage of the events like they did for October 7th? No.
by encomiast | 2026-02-28 15:21:47+00:00
uh...okay. The legend of Faust is the classic work where a person sells his soul to the devil for power/knowledge/pleasure. Goethe has Faust make a wager with the Mephistopheles: show me the good life (pleasure, power, knowledge, whatever) it will never be enough to make me stop striving, to make me want to linger. If you can do that my soul is yours. To me it reads a _lot_ like our contract with AI.
by lioeters | 2026-02-28 15:22:14+00:00
> religion like behaviours

That phrasing makes me imagine a cultural anthropologist studying the behavior of programmers in the wild, their tool use, rituals, magical worldviews like object-orientation. There's that classic paper about how a language is a "tool for thinking", that it both expands and limits how and what a person can think. It makes sense that it shares characteristics with religion, a conceptual system of interfacing with the world.
AllInOneTools – Free, no-login tools that run in the browser
by allinonetools_ | 2026-02-28 15:22:55+00:00
Hi HN,

I built AllInOneTools to solve a simple frustration: most small online tools ask for signup, load slowly, or push ads everywhere.

I wanted tools that open instantly and let you finish the task without friction.

So I built a collection of browser-based utilities that:

– require no login
– run directly in the browser
– focus on speed and simplicity

The goal is simple: open → do the task → close.

I’d really appreciate your feedback on what feels useful and what doesn’t.
by Bender | 2026-02-28 15:23:00+00:00
What are the chances that HN is getting astroturfed these days?

Happens all day every day. There are many AI agents starting discussions and replying to comments. This is how The Crappening started on 4chan. Some of them are just future grifters. Some are training AI (I have replied to a few for fun). Some are propaganda bots. Those running the bots will reply with something equiv to Errrm Proof?? when called out. Without root I can not empirically prove it.

I predict about 2 years before the site will have more AI noise than real people. I have no idea what can be done about it aside from tracking the bots and reporting them via email to Daniel and I don't know what he could or would do. HN has always been very hands off which is mostly good but not for this scenario. If nothing is done it will just be bots grifting and AstroTurfing one another to the benefit of Google SEO and most of the humans would eventually go elsewhere with exception of some die-hards that refuse to recognize the situation.
by VioletCranberry | 2026-02-28 15:23:02+00:00
I built CocoSearch to fix a problem with code RAG: most tools split source files on token count or character limits, breaking functions and classes across chunk boundaries. The retriever can never return a coherent unit of code.

CocoSearch uses Tree-sitter via https://github.com/cocoindex-io/cocoindex to split at syntax boundaries — functions, classes, config blocks stay intact. At search time, a second Tree-sitter pass expands matched chunks to enclosing scope boundaries (capped at 50 lines), so results are always self-contained code units.

Search is hybrid: pgvector cosine similarity + PostgreSQL tsvector keyword matching, fused via RRF. Symbol-level filtering (type, name glob) narrows results before fusion.

Where it matters most for DevOps/platform engineers: most code search tools treat YAML, HCL, and Dockerfiles as plain text. Searching "S3 bucket with versioning" across Terraform files returns random line matches because the tool has no concept of a resource block boundary. CocoSearch ships 8 grammar handlers — GitHub Actions (job/step boundaries), GitLab CI (job/stage boundaries), Docker Compose (service definitions), Helm (chart/template/values), Kubernetes (resource manifests), and Terraform (resource/data blocks). These split infrastructure configs at domain-aware boundaries and extract structured metadata, so search results land on complete, meaningful units. Without grammar handlers, your CI workflow YAML gets chunked on whitespace like any other text file. The grammar system is extensible — copy a template, define path patterns and separators, it gets autodiscovered.

The dependency graph covers the same territory: Python, JS/TS, Go, plus Docker Compose (image refs, depends_on, extends), GitHub Actions (uses action/workflow refs, needs inter-job deps), GitLab CI (include, extends, needs, trigger pipelines), Terraform (module sources, required_providers, remote_state), and Helm (template includes, Chart.yaml subcharts). Forward trees, reverse impact analysis, and dependency-enriched search results.

One thing I'm particularly happy with: a Markdown extractor tracks references from documentation to source files (inline links, code spans, frontmatter depends: fields). During PR review, impact analysis flags docs that reference changed files — so "you renamed cli.py but docs/architecture.md and CLAUDE.md still link to it" surfaces automatically instead of relying on reviewers to notice.

Stack: PostgreSQL 17 + pgvector, Ollama for local embeddings (optional OpenAI/OpenRouter), CocoIndex, Tree-sitter. Runs as CLI, MCP server, web dashboard, or REPL. 32 languages, 8 grammar handlers, 10 dependency extractors. MIT licensed.

Happy to answer questions about the chunking approach, grammar handlers, or anything else.
by ozgrakkurt | 2026-02-28 15:23:05+00:00
It makes a lot more sense if you picture a bunch of organized, strong and merciless chimps attacking some other chimps to plunder what they have.

Chimps generally agree war is bad and horrific. But some smart, opportunistic and hard-working chimps can create situations that make war possible. Even though the war will only bring losses to most chimps on both sides.
by crazygringo | 2026-02-28 15:23:09+00:00
Yup. There are good reasons why it's a problem in financial markets but NOT usually a problem in prediction markets:

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/02/18/why-insider-tra...

> In prediction markets, informed trading is not a crime or an injustice—it is a valuable service.

A big exception, however, is using prediction markets to make predictions on events regarding publicly traded companies.
by Dwedit | 2026-02-28 15:23:09+00:00
I've seen the alternative where you make a tiny JPEG file (discarding the huffman and quantization tables), and use that as the placeholder. Just glue the header and tables back on, and let the browser handle JPEG decoding and stretching. It's not as small as 16 bytes, but the code for handling it is fast and simple.

The trick of using common huffman and quantization tables for multiple images has been done for a long time, notably Flash used it to make embedded JPEGs smaller (for when they were saved at the same quality level).
by daveguy | 2026-02-28 15:23:11+00:00
Current LLMs are nowhere near qualified to be autonomous without a human in the loop. They just aren't rigorous enough. Especially the "scientist throwing a swarm to deal with common ML exploratory tasks." The judgement of most steps in the exploratory task require human feedback based on the domain of study.

> Many of the recommendations will feel too much or too little complexity for what people need and the fundamentals get lost: intent for design, control, the ability to collaborate if necessary, fast iteration due to an easy feedback loop.

Completely agreed. This is because LLMs are atrocious at judgement and guiding the sequence of exploration is critically dependent on judgement.
by mandevil | 2026-02-28 15:23:20+00:00
TFA talked about the difficulty of division, and waved at the idea that farming was different from pastoral societies because of the ease of division: farming land is more valuable as it is concentrated (because of the well known dangers of having many very small plots that are difficult to work and improve) but a herd (or fishing tools) can be split and merged far more easily. So agriculture drives to unigenture.

A blog post like this is mostly hand-waving at complex ideas, but that was her argument for it.
by Tesl | 2026-02-28 15:23:28+00:00
I don't completely disagree with what you are saying -- but there's no way you produce and review 20k lines a day. That part is clearly false. Even if Claude generated it in 10 seconds and it needed no changes you probably still couldn't review that much sensibly.

I used Claude a lot on a recent project where it probably wrote 15-20k lines in a month, and it was overall excellent.
by ALittleLight | 2026-02-28 15:23:39+00:00
This seems like the kind of foolishness it takes a lot of money to believe. Anthropic blew up their contract with the Pentagon over concerns on lethal autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance. OpenAI rushes in to do what Anthropic wouldn't.

If you think that means your company isn't going to be involved in lethal autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance... I don't really know what to tell you. I doubt you really believe that. Obviously you will be involved in that and you are effectively working on those projects now.
by grayhatter | 2026-02-28 15:23:48+00:00
I doubt it's possible to draw a concrete line between in domain, and out of domain. Would you mind trying with a specific example? Because so much of engineering is understanding the interactions between systems. While I cant enumerate the exact asm codes, I do need to understand how the compiler is going to rewrite my function if I want to understand if a cast is safe, or if this function call order needs to be rewritten, or if I'm need a mutex to protect this from a torn read.