MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by andyngdz | 2026-02-17 03:36:12+00:00
Hi HN. I built ExoGen, a cross-platform desktop app for local image generation (using Hugging Face models). It solves the pain of manual setup by automating Python installation, virtual environments, and dependencies in the background.

I'm looking for feedback on the overall experience and performance.
Repo: https://github.com/andyngdz/exogen
by t-writescode | 2026-02-17 03:36:46+00:00
> But the first step is to believe that what people have been screaming about their lives for the past several years actually exists. Even a representative agent, forward-looking and fully aware of all the parameters surrounding them, can feel the vibecession.

Gee. Who would have fucking thought.

When people, en masse, are saying they're in pain, *believe them*. They have very real fears or stressors, even if "you" can't understand them.
by drdaeman | 2026-02-17 03:37:17+00:00
Is that really so?

They maintained census, but for government functions (like accounting and taxes), and actual identity communication almost never involved government.

Passports use for anything except international travel is a very modern thing as well.

For most of the history the source of identify was individual themselves (as it should be), that is, one told their name and origin and others accepted that, unless someone knew otherwise.
by debarshri | 2026-02-17 03:37:53+00:00
We have been doing this lately; when we hit a roadblock with open source, we run Claude code for fixing OSS issues and contributing back. We genuinely put effort into testing it out thoroughly.

We don't want to bother maintainers, as they can focus on more important issues. I think a lot of tail-end issues and bugs can be addressed in OSS.

We leave it up to the maintainers to accept the PR or not, but we solve our problems as we thoroughly test the changes.
by ggm | 2026-02-17 03:38:56+00:00
Heard a talk in Paris about a guy who "war drove" around town using a higher layer Mobile IP ap which could sweep up open SSID, connect, and (ab)use the bandwidth to maintain a link "above" it (I guess like an agile VPN)

he was getting 100mbit class speeds routinely. Also patches of nothing, but it was interesting. That was over 5 years ago.
by vaxman | 2026-02-17 03:38:58+00:00
1. Yes, replacing millions of employees with autocomplete running on nuclear powered vector processing units is totally ridiculous on its face,

2. but Perception is Reality in business

3. and FOMO is real.

Hence, the AI money machine https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1ppla7o/oc...

Even though many of these players are not publicly traded, they're clearly manipulating the public equity markets with their funky receivables and equity swaps, inadvertently creating what has become the largest "company" in the history of the World and setting us all up for a Greater Depression. https://d0k5l7l4820swi.archive.is/3GCs7/463302388f7f218ff374...

Like the USSR before it, China is a force to be reckoned with and certainly we need to increase national productivity and workforce participation in order to keep up with our debt, but this is not how we countered Sputnik as the memories of the 1930s and two World Wars were still top of mind. Look your children in the eyes and ask if the risk that's being put upon us is worth ...them. https://youtu.be/lNXTKVxOmfk
by amarant | 2026-02-17 03:39:50+00:00
We need to have a catchier term for AI assisted coding, so that we may easily distinguish it from Vibe coding slop.

Using AI to find relevant parts of a codebase, help you remember stuff like which annotations a data class needs for dB persistence(yes I'm a Java server dev, hi!) is awesome. Having Claude solo dev an application based on a prompt generated by gpt is something else entirely(pretty fun, but not very useful for anything more complicated than mega-trivial)

Open claw is like the third level to this that also exists for some reason.
by CompromisedTool | 2026-02-17 03:40:15+00:00
I think it’s all constraint based, with a black hole being an n-scale closure. So in this model, a star collapsing with no supernova is where there is simply little to no excess after the closure occurs.

I’ve a version of this that uses only local adjacency rules by which a dynamic lattice emerges. Hit me up if you want to know more, but it connects these: Fano Plane, S(5,8,24), and Golay Code, and the leech lattice

You cannot enter a black hole, they have no interior. They are pure curved space, literally an inverse of normal space.

Pi is actually not invariant in the discrete world! The continuum illusion is only intermittently tangent to the underlying discrete reality. The tick tock of the universe is a xor, local and global constraints resolve perfectly because everything is connected via perfect inviolable discrete parity on a discrete leech-like lattice, whereby shells embedded in the lattice can and must simplify to preserve parity. No ontic fields, they are but quotients on the current state at some scale. Particles are dynamic closure witnesses which can group and “propagate”. I have a simulator, but the calculation time grows so very quickly.
by MontyCarloHall | 2026-02-17 03:41:14+00:00
How long until AI can automate this process?

>Squire and his team could see, from the type of light sockets and electrical outlets visible in the images, that Lucy was in North America.
>The team discovered that a sofa seen in some of the images was only sold regionally, not nationally, and therefore had a more limited customer base. But that still amounted to about 40,000 people.

Current AI technology is easily capable of both of these. I bet it could probably pick up on additional household items not caught by the team and further narrow the search space. But identifying the smoking gun required bringing in obscure expertise:

>The exposed brick wall in Lucy's bedroom could give them a lead. "So, I started just Googling bricks" says Squire. "It wasn't too many searches [before] I found the Brick Industry Association [and] John Harp, who had been working in brick sales since 1981, [who] "noticed that the brick was a very pink-cast brick, and it had a little bit of a charcoal overlay on it. It was a modular eight-inch brick and it was square-edged. When I saw that, I knew exactly what the brick was: a 'Flaming Alamo'".

I wonder if a general-purpose AI not specifically trained on bricks would ever be able to identify this.

>The team returned to the sofa customer list and narrowed that down to just those clients who lived within a 100-mile radius of [the brick factory that produced Flaming Alamos]. Squire and his colleagues began sending photos of these houses to John Harp, the brick expert. Flaming Alamos were not visible on the outside of any of the homes, because the properties were clad in other materials. But the team asked Harp to assess - by looking at their style and exterior - if these properties were likely to have been built during a period when Flaming Alamos had been on sale. "We would basically take a screenshot of that house or residence and shoot it over to John and say 'would this house have these bricks inside?'"

Seems like an automated review of property records could also accomplish this, which an AI would easily be capable of doing.

While it's fantastic that Squire and his team identified the pedophile using these techniques, it's a bit scary to think how easily many of those same techniques could be automated via AI, which would make it trivial to stalk people based on photos posted online intended to be anonymous.
by Sean-Der | 2026-02-17 03:41:28+00:00
Broadcast Box is a project that I have been maintaining for a few years, but feels even more relevant with streaming services locking things down more and more.

I originally built Broadcast Box so I can get WHIP support into OBS, but it outgrew that. I love this new generation of streaming that is more intimate. Instead of pushing video to a large audience you pull a group of friends into a stream and low latency makes you feel more connected.

Always looking for feedback on the architecture, docs, and onboarding experience! especially suggestions to make setup easier for new users.
by obrien_leo | 2026-02-17 03:43:22+00:00
I spent years running six figure monthly ad budgets for law firms. The thing that always drove me crazy was this: Google Ads optimizes on what it can see. A form fill. A phone call. But it has no idea what happens after that. Did the lead actually show up? Did they have budget? Did they sign a contract?
So the algorithm just keeps finding more people who fill out forms. Some of those people are great. A lot of them are garbage. And you're paying the same cost per click either way.
I tried connecting CRM data back to Google manually. It worked, kind of, but it was fragile, took forever to maintain, and broke every time something changed on either end. The tools that exist for this cost $400 to $5,000 a month and are mostly built for ecom.
So I built Adscriptly. It pulls conversion signals from places like CallRail, HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, GoHighLevel, and others, then uses AI to score those leads and push enriched conversion data back into Google Ads. The idea is simple. Tell the algorithm which leads actually turned into money so it stops chasing the ones that didn't.
There's also a keyword optimization agent that watches search terms and flags wasted spend automatically.
Tech stack if anyone's curious: the platform connects via APIs to CRMs, call tracking platforms, and Google Ads. Lead scoring runs through ML models looking at call duration, engagement patterns, and custom criteria you set.
I'm at launch stage. Product is live, I'm looking for early users who run Google Ads want to try it.
by adithyassekhar | 2026-02-17 03:43:42+00:00
Hi I am a non native english speaker as well. Please don't be discouraged. But you're not speaking with your own voice if I make sense.

Honestly I prefer to talk to humans who have flaws. Even if your english is bad try typing it yourself. Everyone here will support you. That's how I learned.

Even my team mates use chatgpt to rewrite their messages in teams, it feels so dishonest.
by mikelevins | 2026-02-17 03:43:53+00:00
I'm finding that in several kinds of projects ranging from spare-time amusements to serious work, LLMs have become useful to me by (1) engaging me in a conversation that elicits thoughts and ideas from me more quickly than I come up with them without the conversation, and (2) pointing me at where I can get answers to technical questions so that I get the research part of my work done more quickly.

Talking with other knowledgeable humans works just as well for the first thing, but suitable other humans are not as readily available all the time as an LLM, and suitably-chosen LLMs do a pretty good job of engaging whatever part of my brain or personality it is that is stimulated through conversation to think inventively.

For the second thing, LLMs can just answer most of the questions I ask, but I don't trust their answers for reasons that we all know very well, so instead I ask them to point me at technical sources as well, and that often gets me information more quickly than I would have by just starting from a relatively uninformed google search (though Google is getting better at doing the same job, too).
by jezek2 | 2026-02-17 03:44:43+00:00
Interestingly I've never used Visual Studio on Windows (only for a brief time for ARM based PDAs where I could experience the infamous MFC which was okay to me despite the hate).

I've used Borland C++ and Watcom C/C++ back in the day and MinGW after that. Also COM was invented for interoperation between languages/compilers.

Being a good citizen means to not use the inherently unstable C++ ABI directly. You can use C API or even COM for that. Relying on it is cute but it's accidental and it will break in the future. Microsoft can't guarantee that it will stay stable because C++ is always evolving, forcing to break the compatibility.

Open source projects shouldn't depend on proprietary compilers (they can support them, but not as the only option). It just undermines the purpose of it.

The reasons I use MinGW is because it produces better compatible binaries on Windows, allowing me to support all Windows versions from Windows 2000 to latest with a single binary (and sometimes 64bit if there is a need/advantage) and it doesn't require me to bundle dozens of DLLs (or worse, installing them system-wide) and artifically limit the compatibility for no reason.

Breaking the compatibility is hostile to the users who can't or want to always use the latest Windows.
by samantp | 2026-02-17 03:44:45+00:00
Spam is an issue mainly because there are conspicuous meaty targets to be spammed, not in fragmented environments. And a target is meaty for spammers because that target has gathered, more often unnecessary, critical mass (large scale services, broadcast type news /thought leaders/influencers). Else even a small overhead for sending requests will drive away spammer incentive.

E.g. OS exploits were targeted towards Windows, not so much for so many of those Linux distros.
by benreesman | 2026-02-17 03:44:48+00:00
Monetization destroyed open source. Agent code made the bankruptcy legible.

Open source software was trivially better in the nineties because it was done by people who would have and often did do it for free. Those people are better by simp.

The people bitching about it now didn't push back when it unified on a forge, or when it sold to Microsoft, or when it started working in like button stars.

They're bitching now that their grift is up.
by _wire_ | 2026-02-17 03:45:26+00:00
How about promoting a coding agent to design a new interoperability language for agents? Of all the things AI could expected to help with, could there be any more on-the-nose for combining justification of tech with the agents own interests? Or do you not ask slaves how they want to organize?

Come to think of it, why hasn't an AI coding agent already developed this on its own?!
by k310 | 2026-02-17 03:46:52+00:00
Ease of use was always possible. Three factors always mitigated aginst it.

1. It costs willingness and money to do so.

2. Tech is saturated with complexity bias.

3. Let’s face it. Most companies and management are “superior” to users; little Musks and Thiels, just with less power to make people feel inferior. It’s the Curtis Yarvin syndrome, and it’s getting worse, not better.

AI “could” help but AFAICT, general purpose AI, without the guardrails that Thiel and Musks paid boatloads of money to prevent, is just plain dangerous. Witness suicides and more.

I’m 77 and tech was my entire career. I keep up daily via HN. And MY gripe is that I KNOW what’s going on, and how to make it better, at least conceptually, and I see it getting worse. One of my “funnest” little projects was writing up a little app (in Hypercard) for a division director who didn’t know computers from a ham sandwich, and it was just right.

So, when will people

1. Give a damn and spend money to make things usable?

2. Invite “real people” into design discussions?

3. Try to keep things simple?

4. Have a heart instead of a “supremacy” complex?
by drdaeman | 2026-02-17 03:47:07+00:00
I understand this. I also understand that if history teaches us anything it’s that any centralized governance (of any nature, not just traditional national and regional governments, but any centrally organized communities, like corporations) is to be constantly distrusted and kept in check, and even then it’s dangerous to let it take over social functions. That’s why I wrote “only as a last resort”, that is, unless and until someone thinks of something better. (And then switching over is another issue… that may need some pre-planning even better new solution exists.)

Or maybe someday we’ll have some interesting revelations about personal identity and sybil resistance won’t be necessary. But that’ll probably be only some centuries later.
Ask HN: How do companies that use Cursor handle compliance?
by Poomba | 2026-02-17 03:48:00+00:00
I'm trying to decide whether to adopt Cursor for our company, but we're in a heavily regulated industry and our compliance team is flagging concerns about HIPAA/SOC2/audit trails.

The thing is, there are companies in regulated industries using it [1][2]. But Cursor has no HIPAA BAA, no FedRAMP certification, and is cloud-only with all requests routing through their AWS infrastructure. (This is probably true for Claude and other coding assistants, though I've only looked seriously at Cursor.)

So how are regulated companies actually making this work? Or do most just avoid Cursor and other AI coding tools altogether?

[1] 165 healthcare companies use Cursor according to Bloomberry: https://bloomberry.com/data/cursor/

[2] Cursor's customers include Sanofi, Johnson & Johnson, and Neuralink: https://cursor.com/customers
by bsder | 2026-02-17 03:49:06+00:00
A bit of engineering and a lot of myth and degradation due to time.

The engineering seems to be a combination of genuine construction advances and the usage of wood that was abnormally dense due to having been grown during a big drought.

This, of course, contributed to the "myths" around the Strads with the varnishes, techniques, etc. supposedly being "The Thing(tm)" that made Strads so much better.

Finally, wood degrades with time--period. It doesn't matter how much you try to preserve it, it's just fact. The current Strads are either "Ship of Theseus" type violins, or they are heavily degraded.

At this point, modern luthiers create better instruments than even a Strad in its prime. They have access to better woods, better glues and finishes, better tools and training, better analyzers and better players than anyone in the time of Stradivarius.

When played as close to double blind as is possible, the data comes back with modern players preferring modern violins made by modern luthiers over the old Strads.
by ddoronin | 2026-02-17 03:50:20+00:00
Hi HN,

I've been building with LLM agents and MCP servers lately and kept hitting the same wall: once you have more than one agent, orchestration gets messy very fast.

So, I built int-64, a visual runtime for multi-agent systems that treats orchestration as a first-class concern. The core idea: pull orchestration logic out of prompts and agent code, and make it explicit as an execution graph. Agents are nodes in the graph, nodes can call tools, MCP servers or other agents (recursively). Execution paths are visible and controllable.

Is visual flow control actually useful, or do you prefer staying in code?

Site: https://int-64.com

Happy to answer questions or dive into technical details.
by ajross | 2026-02-17 03:50:42+00:00
It's not an economic effect. The news is all awful. If you're in the US and on the left, or outside the US, the world is descending into autocratic chaos and police state violence. If you're in the US and on the right, the country is descending into chaos at the hands of the anarchist left and the invasion of a horde of immigrants who need to be suppressed by autocratic chaos and police state violence.

Yeah yeah, there's food on the shelves and money in your pocket. But it's scary out there for everyone, and that trumps (heh) rationality.

The solution is to get Washington and partisan media to, ahem, shut the fuck up and just let people be happy. But that doesn't put bribes in their pockets or advertisers on their screens, so on with the autocratic chaos.
by verdverm | 2026-02-17 03:51:11+00:00
Copilot can be used in these situations, that's what most of our devs use. I suspect Claude Code is going to be evaluated in the near future. Personally, I have permission from the CTO to hook my custom agent up to the GCloud Vertex APIs because we know it all stays in Google, which is compliant across their portfolio. Microslop is too, which is why Copilot is available. All the frontier models are available as well between both Google and Microsoft, I have no need for OpenAI or xAI, so VertexAI has everything I personally want.
by alephnerd | 2026-02-17 03:51:55+00:00
I think it would be beneficial to conduct such analysis at a subnational level, becuase the reality is the market dynamics in the Bay Are are distinct from those in Chicagoland.

A similar macro-level analysis by the FT highlighted how certain states are in the midst of a positive economic expansion and others have fallen into a deep recessionary cycle [0].

I've also noticed HN cycles of pessimism and optimism shift significantly based on time zone - which could be attributed to this subnational malaise.

[0] - https://www.ft.com/content/e9be3e3f-2efe-42f7-b2d2-8ab3efea2...
Show HN: M-Courtyard – Fine-tune LLMs on your Mac with zero code
by tuwenbo0120 | 2026-02-17 03:52:04+00:00
Hi HN! I built M-Courtyard because fine-tuning LLMs locally was frustrating — CLI tools, Python scripts, and scattered documentation.

This app wraps the full pipeline (document → dataset → fine-tune → test → export to Ollama) into a single desktop app that runs entirely on Apple Silicon.

Tech: Tauri 2.x + React + mlx-lm + Ollama
License: AGPL 3.0

Would love feedback on what models or features would be most useful.
by cryptonector | 2026-02-17 03:53:18+00:00
In my experience LLMs mimic human thought, so they don't "copy" but they do write from "experience" -- and they know more than any single developer can.

So I'm getting tired of the argument that LLMs are "plagiarism machines" -- yes, they can be coaxed into repeating training material verbatim, but no, they don't do that unless you try.

Opus 4.6's C compiler? I've not looked at it, but I would bet it does not resemble GCC -- maybe some corners, but overall it must be new, and if the prompting was specific enough as to architecture and design then it might not resemble GCC or any other C compiler much at all.

Not only do LLMs mimic human thinking, but also they mimic human faults. Obviously one way in which they mimic human faults is that there are mistakes in the LLMs' training materials, so they will evince some imperfections, and even contradictions (since there will be contradictions in their training materials). Another way is that their context windows are limited, just like ours. I liken their hallucinations to crappy code written by a tired human at 3AM after a 20 hour day.

If they are so human-like, we really cannot ascribe their output to plagiarism except when prompted so as to plagiarize.
by holmesworcester | 2026-02-17 03:53:48+00:00
It was standard practice by the police and DA in 2000s Massachusetts.

Neighbors were annoyed at loud college parties at the school I went to, so local police waited in bushes to catch people peeing in them, arrested them, and one of the charges was indecent exposure.

Happened to one person I knew personally so it must have happened to several others at just this school.

My friend plead out to some lower charge or probably got a continuance, but it massively increased the leverage they had over him and the fees and fines they could collect, and it massively lowered the chance of him doing any pushback that could have lead to a jury trial, which at least as far as he understood at the time would have put him on the registry, and which is why they abused the law and charged people this way.
by canada_dry | 2026-02-17 03:54:52+00:00
This is what I've been doing for a couple years now: having AI help to code/test projects that I've had in my long TODO list but would never realistically started/completed. AI is now pretty capable of producing decent code if your specifications are decent.

I still think that non-programmers are going to have a tough time with vibe coding. Nuances and nomenclature in the language you are targeting and programming design principles in general help in actually getting AI to build something useful.

A simple example is knowing to tell AI that a window should be 'modal' or that null values should default to xyz.