MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: A text format for UI wireframes – comparing token costs across 4 format
by enlinks | 2026-02-05 04:37:36+00:00
I've been exploring how to describe UI layouts to LLMs efficiently.

The problem: When you ask an AI to generate or modify UI, how do you describe the current state?
- Natural language ("header on top, form below") is ambiguous
- ASCII art breaks when edited (alignment issues)
- HTML is precise but verbose

I ran some measurements. For a simple login form:
- Natural language: 102 tokens
- ASCII art: 84 tokens
- HTML: 330 tokens

I experimented with a grid-based text format using Excel-like cell references:

grid: 4x3
A1..D1: { type: txt, value: "Login" }
A2..D2: { type: input, label: "Email" }
D3: { type: btn, value: "Submit" }

This came out to 120 tokens – less than HTML, more precise than natural language.

Built a CLI to render it to SVG/PNG: npx ktr input.kui -o output.png

Curious what approaches others have tried for this problem. Is there something
I'm missing that already solves this well?

Code: https://github.com/enlinks-llc/katsuragi
by rbbydotdev | 2026-02-05 04:38:02+00:00
> is kind of entitlement blogging that I have nearly zero respect for.

Maybe the author left out something very real. Apple is a walled-garden monopoly with a locked-down ecosystem and even devices. They are also not alone in this. As far as innovation goes, these companies stifle innovation. Demanding more from these companies is not entitlement.
by nkapias | 2026-02-05 04:39:21+00:00
All platforms have their own known single way to deploy, they give the documentation to AI as constraints.

Most softwares we work with can use modules, else some users with privileged access can run it locally in cli or browser.
Ownership and limited trust are prevalent, for example only the commercial manager has access to deploy modules to CRM.
They usually are constrained to read access, unless they are informed engineering managers.

Ideally I'd give them a pipeline to deploy static pages, or predefined dynamic architectures. The security risks are too great, I don't trust they would have enough time / interest to become autonomous in unconstrained environments so I didn't pursue the idea, maybe I could for static pages, or in isolated networks ..
by nobody9999 | 2026-02-05 04:39:39+00:00
>I have an even simpler step one: increase the IRS budget significantly so that they actually have enough resources to go after the big guys.

>It's on a downward spiral consistently, and it was further cut by 9% this year.

Has it been on a downward spiral?

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022[0] added $80 billion over ten years to the IRS budget[1] (a good step in the right direction, IMHO), but which has now been withdrawn. Gee, I wonder why?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act

[1] https://www.irs.gov/statistics/irs-budget-and-workforce

Edit: Added index [0] for link.
by johnfn | 2026-02-05 04:39:41+00:00
> It can code in an autocomplete sense.

I just (right before hopping on HN) finished up a session where an agent rewrote 3000 lines of custom tests. If you know of any "autocomplete" that can do something similar, let me know. Otherwise, I think saying LLMs are "autocomplete" doesn't make a lot of sense.
by duskwuff | 2026-02-05 04:40:11+00:00
The example isn't wrong, it's just looking at the timing a little differently from how you're used to. It's treating the blanking time as all occurring at the end of a line, instead of splitting it into front porch / back porch. This is a common pattern in video generators, since it means you can use a single counter for display and blanking, and define the blanking condition in terms of the counter exceeding the active count, e.g.

blanking := hcount >= 640 || vcount >= 480;
output := blanking ? 0 : framebuffer[vcount][hcount];
by noduerme | 2026-02-05 04:40:25+00:00
I bill quarter-hourly at $300/hr for actual time writing or evaluating code. Phone conversations are free, and I take time to evaluate and explain what I'm doing before clocking in. The downside to this is that I make myself available 24/7 should any issues arise. I also don't necessarily charge for hunting down network issues or bugs (because I also host some software for clients). It works out to a good income for 80 hours a month or so.

I'm terrible at sales. My clients have only come to me by rererral from other clients. More than half the time, I'll tell prospective clients that there are already SaaS solutions that would be better for them than building something bespoke, and help them find solutions, because I don't want to do work that's already been done.
by kaycey2022 | 2026-02-05 04:40:41+00:00
I think this pov lacks empathy.

What if you don't want to trust your computer with all your email and bank accounts? This is still not a mass market product.

The main problem I see here is that with restricted context AI is not able to do much. In order to see this kind of "magic" you have to give it all the access.

This is neither safe or acceptable for normie customers
by saidinesh5 | 2026-02-05 04:40:43+00:00
> But with "AI", not only is it not a product in itself, it's a feature to a product, but it has OpEx and CapEx costs that dominate the balance sheet based on their public disclosures. Worse, as a feature, it demonstrably harms business with its hallucinations.

I think it depends on how the feature is used? I see it as mostly as yet another user interface in most applications. Every couple of years I keep forgetting the syntax and formulas available in Excel. I can either search for answers or describe what i want and let the LLM edit the spread sheet for me and i just verify.

Also, as time passes the OpEx and CapEx are projected to reduce right?
It maybe a good thing that companies are burning through their stockpiles of $$$ in trying to find out the applicability and limits of this new technology. Maybe something good will come out of it.
by evanelias | 2026-02-05 04:41:24+00:00
Also check out ProxySQL [1][2], it's an extremely powerful and battle-tested proxy. Originally it was only for MySQL/MariaDB, where it is very widely used at scale, even despite MySQL already having excellent built-in scalable threaded connection management. But ProxySQL also added Postgres support too in 2024 and that has become a major focus.

[1] https://proxysql.com/

[2] https://github.com/sysown/proxysql
by jimmydoe | 2026-02-05 04:41:26+00:00
> We are committed to broad, democratic decision making in addition to access. We are also committed to building the most resilient ecosystem for advanced AI. We care a great deal about safe, broadly beneficial AGI, and we know the only way to get there is to work with the world to prepare.

> One authoritarian company won't get us there on their own, to say nothing of the other obvious risks. It is a dark path.

It’s one thing to say your competitors are hypocrites they will have ads one day, just watch. But democratic vs authoritarian? Come on. What is next? They are Chinese spies and Russian agents? Smh
by ast0708 | 2026-02-05 04:41:30+00:00
How corporate incentives are aligned will also define the trajectory. The person who is going to take the call whether to go for vibe coded tool or external vendor has to have enough incentive to put this neck on the line.

Imagine this, you are VP of finance. You know you can get a nice tax calculator built quickly using vibe coding, but will you put your neck on the line and say, let's replace the existing vendor and use my vibe coded tool. You might fired if you send a wrong tax report to your auditor.

Let's take another example - VP of sales wants performance report and visuazliation of the sales team. He has 200 BDRs. The daily sales standup depends on this report, team gets yelled at or praised basis this. Now, will this VP be willing to put his neck on the line and say - let's use my vibe coded report and discard the existing SaaS. Even if such a report feels trivial, it is vital for functioning the sales team and hence, it needs to be reliable.

I think vibe coding will work at prototype level - the trust gap is very huge right now to even consider it for internal tools.

And, until vibe coded tools are stress tested enough this trust gap will not be fulfilled. Think about this, why some of the biggest companies in the world still run on softwares built in 2000s.
by QuiEgo | 2026-02-05 04:42:03+00:00
I recommend reading the AES-XTS spec, in particular the “tweak”. Or for AES-GCM look at how IV works.

I also recommend looking up PUF and how modern systems use it in conjunction with user provided secrets to dervie keys - a password or fingerprint is one of many inputs into a kdf to get the final keys.

Tl;dr this is a well solved problem on modern security designs.
by petersumskas | 2026-02-05 04:43:32+00:00
AI is like electricity. It may be the “product” you think you are selling. But it isn’t the product people are buying.

People are buying what these things facilitate (lights, tvs, air conditioning, etc in the case of electricity)

I think the AI folk have generally done a terrible job of connecting the dots to show people what they are actually getting.

It’s worth noting that some things mentioned above already existed before electricity. So people needed to be shown that electric light is in almost all ways better, cheaper, more convenient than existing alternatives.
by hedora | 2026-02-05 04:44:44+00:00
I’m new to 3d printing. I saw bambu pushed a firmware update that bricked offline mode, so didn’t really consider them when shopping around.

I’m really liking my (better specs for less money) elegoo centauri. I compiled the slicer from source because there weren’t Linux binaries.

All problems solved. It even happily prints exotic stuff like TPU, which I guess bambu has been cracking down on for unclear reasons.

Maybe I don’t know what I’m missing, but I’ve had zero issues downloading files (even from bambu-centric websites) and running them through the slicer.

I can’t imagine wanting to use their cloud whatever thing, or it providing any value beyond the open source stacks.
by alecfong | 2026-02-05 04:45:29+00:00
mmoney-cli is a CLI that turns Monarch Money into a personal finance backend you can query from the terminal and hook up to AI agents like Claude Code.

Monarch already does the hard work of aggregation, categorization, and syncing. mmoney-cli exposes that data as structured primitives so you can script against it or let an agent reason over it.
by Joel_Mckay | 2026-02-05 04:45:43+00:00
For Sata HDD shingled writes and SSD sector replacement it can't be cleaned that way.

Tools like dban stopped working once firmware sector re-mapping chips on modern storage became common. If you see the reported spare replacement count drop on your older s.m.a.r.t reports, than partial sectors may no longer be accessed from the OS without vendor specific forensic software. =3

https://sourceforge.net/projects/dban/
by notepad0x90 | 2026-02-05 04:45:50+00:00
You make good points, but my point wasn't that Russia would use a beachhead in the arctic, but that it can use flight paths through the arctic to project power in southern Canada. long-range missiles are one thing, but strategic long-range bombers with some in-flight refueling too. As far as an actual invading force, that I concede, they can't do that today, but who knows what they're planning, they have the manpower, the money and the lunacy to build up such a force. Their main advantage is the nuclear deterrent preventing others from invading them back. Canada has been left alone so far (by everyone hostile) because it has (had?) the US's protection, not because of it's fearsome military (although I know they're quite fierce on their own -- just not B52, nukes, ICBMs, aircraft carriers level fierce).

If I had to speculate, they won't try to take populated centers of Canada, but they might make claims to arctic resources and land, and just take it. Start bombing Toronto and Montreal if Canada fights back. They might even do it in the next few years if the US starts enough chaos elsewhere as a distraction. Once they take land, you're not getting it back, why? Back to my original point: They have nukes.
by keepamovin | 2026-02-05 04:45:59+00:00
This app refuses to run unless it can prove your OS is providing a FIPS-approved cryptographic surface.

Windows: It queries BCryptGetFipsAlgorithmMode.

macOS: It strictly allowlists versions with valid Apple crypto certifications.

The result is if the check fails, it quits. No bundled crypto fallback. No "continue anyway."

It's a "deliberately boring" experiment to see what happens when you apply strict NIST SP 800-53 controls to a tiny, offline MVP.

It is written in Rust. The source is available for inspection.
by lukeschlather | 2026-02-05 04:46:28+00:00
If you had a scale with an image recognition camera and you put everything on the scale before and after removing it from the fridge, it would probably work pretty well? I've been pondering setting something like that up, it would also be really helpful for keeping track of how much and of what I'm actually putting into the food I made, if I weigh everything before and after, I can just collect the amounts after the fact and don't have to worry as much about measuring if I want to make the same dish again.
by kernelvoid | 2026-02-05 04:47:15+00:00
This is exactly why I built bunqueue — a job queue for Bun backed by SQLite. No Redis, no external dependencies, just bun:sqlite with WAL mode for concurrent access. Handles 100k+ jobs/sec on a single node.

The SQL-as-queue pattern is definitely underrated. Great to hear it worked well at that scale.
by spike_protein | 2026-02-05 04:47:51+00:00
It's not for fun. They are hijacking a trusted server (Zendesk) to smuggle phishing links past my spam filter. Since Zendesk blocked the text relay, their bot is now just spamming signups as a side effect of the failed exploit.

[Ref](https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/8257723564186-...)

[Ref 2](https://darknetsearch.com/knowledge/news/en/zendesk-ticket-s...)
by nkapias | 2026-02-05 04:47:52+00:00
With change management they can be informed of platform / infra and be autonomous to upgrade their app. They usually are in the loop if they have ownership, or will be after it happens a few times.

Also I believe the value is in the output, not the app itself. ROI of a 1 hour AI slop should™ be attained before it rots and they can just spun up a new one.

I might be hopeful and a bit selfish here, I expect my colleagues to own their toolbox.
by hedora | 2026-02-05 04:48:53+00:00
It’ll happen the day this bill is passed.

If they cared even a little bit about gun violence, they’d focus on mental health and other preventive measures.

If they just wanted to provide the illusion that they cared about gun violence, they’d go after high-volume manufacturers first.

This reminds me of Trump’s Venezuela coup. I’m offended they aren’t even bothering to properly lie about their motives.
by IAmLiterallyAB | 2026-02-05 04:49:23+00:00
That doesn't work on any* NAND flash device, be it a flash drive, NVME, SATA, whatever.

The block device you see is an abstraction provided by the SSD controller. In reality, the flash capacity is larger. Pages are swapped out for wear leveling. If a block goes bad, it'll be taken out of commission, and your data may hide in there.

All of this happens on the SSD controller. The kernel doesn't know. You have no way to directly erase or modify specific blocks.

*Okay, there are raw NAND flash chips without controllers, but that is not you're working with when you have a SSD or flash drive. If you do have a raw flash chip, you can more directly control flash contents.
by bsder | 2026-02-05 04:49:39+00:00
In addition, there is a vast difference between say tennis, a sport, and chess, a purely mental activity.

A child prodigy in tennis may find that their body didn't grow in such a way to be a pro as an adult. If your opponents are taller, stronger, have better VO2Max, etc. than you as an adult, it doesn't matter how good you were as a child--they're going to beat you as an adult.

Chess, of course, now provides the stark reverse contrast. If you weren't a child prodigy in chess, you simply will not excel against the competition as an adult.
by dashundchen | 2026-02-05 04:49:52+00:00
2015 - 2016 reddit was exploited to hell by the_donald and other associated reddits. Things like coordinated up voting of a pinned post to get it to shoot up the front page, private chats to manipulate voting in a page.

There would be times when you would go to the r/all and half the page would be posts from them.

Hey quick question, around January 2021, what would happen that caused Trump to be deplatformed? Anything stick out in your mind?
by lelanthran | 2026-02-05 04:55:09+00:00
> This is exactly why I built bunqueue — a job queue for Bun backed by SQLite. No Redis, no external dependencies, just bun:sqlite with WAL mode for concurrent access. Handles 100k+ jobs/sec on a single node.

If you're too lazy to even write your own comments, I suspect you're too lazy to have written your own software.

At least preface your comment with "The LLM says" or preface your submission with "The LLM wrote this software".
by eatonphil | 2026-02-05 04:56:40+00:00
The article addresses this, sort of. I don't understand how you can run multiple postmasters.

> Most online resources chalk this up to connection churn, citing fork rates and the pid-per-backend yada, yada. This is all true but in my opinion misses the forest from the trees. The real bottleneck is the single-threaded main loop in the postmaster. Every operation requiring postmaster involvement is pulling from a fixed pool, the size of a single CPU core. A rudimentary experiment shows that we can linearly increase connection throughput by adding additional postmasters on the same host.
by aidenn0 | 2026-02-05 04:56:43+00:00
Depending on your threat model, your check is insufficient, since dd |hexdump will be all zeros even if you just trim all the blocks for a drive that is trim-to-zero.

Securely erasing flash drives with a threat model of "someone will dump the raw data of the chips" is only fully solvable for self-encrypting drives where you can replace the key. Even if you can issue a block-erase for every single block of the device, block erase doesn't always succeed on NAND.
by dcvr | 2026-02-05 04:56:50+00:00
Technical PM

Location: São Paulo, Brazil

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: product's R&D, software architecture, Python, Common Lisp, Django, API Rest, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, AWS, Bash, Linux servers, applied math, fintech.

Résumé/CV: https://linkedin.com/in/daniel-vieira-r

Email: dradicchi@protonmail.com
by z2 | 2026-02-05 04:57:56+00:00
That resonates with me. Both in the lack of discipline as the adults in my world basically defaulted to, "You're so smart, keep it up!" And -- very much related -- the fixed mindset I developed not knowing until later how to actually study, learn, and practice. It lasted quite long unfortunately as I was a functioning undisciplined, fixed mindset person who could still one-shot stuff reasonably well.
by nutanc | 2026-02-05 04:58:07+00:00
Claude cowork and the SaaSpocalypse case makes no sense.
What are Claude plugins?
Plugins=Commands+Skills+Integrations.
Commands and skills=prompts
So differentiator?
Integrations.
Integrating with?
SaaS companies.
And what is the stock market doing?
Dumping SaaS stocks.
by the_hard_truth | 2026-02-05 04:58:49+00:00
In 2017 the consultants said to move to the cloud. It was 20x as expensive as running your own datacenters. Now the Phoebus cartel has arranged the markets to make everyone say, "it is too expensive to run your own datacenter!", and that is how DHS has accomplished NuCALEA for storage and compute. Flawless Victory!
by kyralis | 2026-02-05 05:00:28+00:00
There are places that care. My organization has a management-backed, engineer-led mentorship program. I'm among the most senior engineers in the org, and a significant portion of my time is spent on mentoring, with general acknowledgement that despite my own abilities my support of other engineers is the highest-impact thing that I can be doing with much of my time.

Teams that don't care about engineer growth will come to regret it.
by tkel | 2026-02-05 05:00:55+00:00
ARM/M1 macOS took their hardware platform from iOS. TEE, signed/verified/readonly system files, etc. They are similar in security now.

[1] https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/security/
[2] https://support.apple.com/guide/security/hardware-security-o...
[3] https://eclecticlight.co/2022/01/04/booting-an-m1-mac-from-h...
by grigri907 | 2026-02-05 05:01:02+00:00
After 10+ years of stewing on an idea, I started building an app (for myself) that I've never had the courage or time to start until now.

I really wanted to learn the coding, the design patterns, etc, but truthfully, it was never gonna happen without a Claude. I could never get past the unknown-unknowns (and I didn't even grasp how broad is the domain of knowledge it actually requires.) Best case I would have started small chunks and abandoned it countless times, piling on defeatism and disappointment each time.

Now in under two weeks of spare time and evenings, I've got a working prototype that's starting to resemble my dream. Does my code smell? Yes. Is it brittle? Almost certainly. Is it a security risk? I hope not. (It's not.)

I want to be intentional about how I use AI; I'm nervous about how it alters how we think and learn. But seeing my little toy out in the real world is flippin incredible.
by bombcar | 2026-02-05 05:01:32+00:00
So many economic indicators are perverse - economically it would often be better for a family to get divorced, split into two homes, and then pay each other child support. Heck, economically it would be advantageous to divorce your stay-at-home wife and turn around and hire her to take care of the kids. You could even pay her more and charge her for room and board! You could charge the kids! Financialize everything!

We need metrics that are actually tied to human happiness, not human suffering.
by bunderbunder | 2026-02-05 05:01:53+00:00
Last time I saw results of a survey on this, it found that for most consumers AI features are a deciding factor in their purchasing decisions. That is, if they are looking at two options and one sports AI features and the other doesn’t, they will pick the one that doesn’t.

It’s possible AI just seems more popular than it is because it’s easy to hear the people who are talking about it but harder to hear the people who aren’t.
by mmooss | 2026-02-05 05:02:48+00:00
I saw an interview with an all-time great NBA basketball player. He was a top high school player and described his childhood like this: When you were at the movies, I was practicing. When you were on dates or hanging out with your buddies, I was practicing. When my family went on a cruise, I was dribbling up and down the hallways. ...

Now imagine the prodigy athlete who goes the movies, hangs out, and relaxes on the cruise. How could they hope to compete?

I recently read an interview Jadeveon Clowney, who was the country's top high school American football player and then the number one pick in the NFL draft. He was widely called a 'freak' athlete. Clowney said he didn't really learn how to understand and play the game until the NFL; until then he could dominate with his physical ability, even playing against elite college players.

He's played 11 years so far in the NFL, which is a long career in an extremely competitive job. We can call him truly 'good'; he was chosen for the Pro Bowl three times, in those years making him > ~85th percentile for his position, but nobody thinks he's an all-time great.

There's not such a clear story about where these people come from. Maybe the basketball player just wasn't as athletic (relative to the population of elite athletes) as Clowney and had to make up for it. Maybe Clowney would have been an all-time great with more work. Maybe there are many other inputs besides work and talent.