MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I tracked 3,519 stock picks from 23 Substacks – who makes money?
by lineudemonia | 2026-02-27 13:54:14+00:00
I subscribe to 23 paid investment newsletters on Substack (~$9,600/year). I couldn't keep up with reading them all, so I built a system to extract and evaluate every stock pick.

*The pipeline:*

- Crawls articles from Substack
- Extracts high-conviction stock picks using Gemini's structured output — filters out casual ticker mentions and only counts calls where the author dedicates real analysis, specific data, or price targets
- Tracks returns at 1d, 7d, 15d, 30d, and 60d post-publication using yfinance
- Calculates alpha vs sector-specific ETF benchmarks (SOXX for semis, IGV for SaaS, XLF for financials, EWJ for Japan, SPY as fallback)
- Deduplication: same author, same ticker within 14 days = one call. Cross-author calls are independent

Total dataset: 3,519 high-conviction calls from 22 authors over 1 year.

*Interesting technical challenges:*

1. AI extraction accuracy. Gemini is surprisingly good at identifying whether an author is making a real call vs. just mentioning a ticker in passing. We tag calls with conviction level (high/low) and direction (bullish/bearish). To validate this, we spot-checked against manual reads and cross-verified with alternative model outputs. Not perfect, but consistent enough to be useful.

2. Custom domain handling. Many Substack authors use custom domains (e.g., collyerbridge.com, lordfed.co.uk) which sometimes trigger Cloudflare challenges. We fall back to headless Playwright when the standard HTTP client gets blocked.

3. Benchmark selection. A naive "did the stock go up?" metric is meaningless in a bull market. We map each ticker to a sector ETF benchmark, so alpha = position return minus benchmark return over the same period. This separates genuine stock-picking skill from just being long in a rising market.

4. Deduplication logic. Authors often revisit the same thesis across multiple articles. Without dedup, a single stock mentioned in 5 articles would count as 5 independent "calls." We use a 14-day window per author per ticker — only the first mention counts.

*Some findings (for context, not the point of this post):*

- Top performer averaged +14.9% at 30d and +26.7% at 60d on long calls
- The most expensive newsletters ($1,000+/year) were not the best performers
- Authors with fewer, more targeted calls (15-80) tended to outperform those with 300+ calls
- 30d vs 60d rankings shift significantly — deep value investors look much better at longer horizons
- Short calls were harder for almost everyone

*Stack:* Python, SQLite, Gemini API (structured output), yfinance, Playwright (optional)

I wrote a more detailed breakdown with charts as an X thread: https://x.com/pyhrroll/status/2027374283669066045?s=20

Happy to discuss the methodology, architecture, or share the extraction prompts. The pipeline is ~2,000 lines of Python if there's interest in seeing the code.
by carlosjobim | 2026-02-27 13:54:28+00:00
People are completely irrational when it comes to their personal finances, and hackers are the group who is most irrational of all.

For a few bucks per month you have access to artificial intelligence on a level which was completely unheard of just a few years ago. A revolution on the level of electricity or radio communication. And you are still complaining about price.

Consider if it's only habit that you have learnt from others. People talk all the time about the price of milk, eggs or gas, even though these things could double in price and still be incredible value. Then they turn around and waste enormous sums of money on completely meaningless stuff.
by DharmaPolice | 2026-02-27 13:54:50+00:00
>The more different the genetic material is, the less you care

This is sort of true but it misses that we don't actually have DNA sensors built into our eyes. Instead we rely on heuristics like the Westermarck effect where we will (normally) tend to not find someone we lived with as a child attractive regardless whether they're a blood relation or not.

We influence who (or what) is in our group through our behaviour, thoughts and associations. Look at the vast number of people who value their dog or cat over other human beings. It's unlikely their dog is closer to them, genetically speaking than any single human on Earth but they spend time and invest emotionally in their pet so they form a bond despite the genetic distance.

If you see a child being hurt it likely invokes a slightly stronger emotional response if the child reminds you of someone in your own life. Often this will be someone who looks like you/your family (i.e. is genetically similar to you) but it might be some other kid you've grown attached to who is not related at all.

So yes, we are driven by a calculating selfish gene mechanism but we're also burdened/gifted with a whole bunch of emotional and social instincts and rely on imperfect sensors not tricorders. It's why people can form group identities over all sorts of non-genetic characteristics (e.g. religion, nation, neighbourhood, sports team affiliation, political ideology, vi vs emacs, etc).
by avh02 | 2026-02-27 13:56:21+00:00
nah, i generally agree with you on single points of failure, i just don't agree that it would go on as long as 2 weeks. 24-48 hours i can believe, but at the absolute worst case I'd also expect anyone with minimal competence to have a plan to spin things up from the latest offsite backup somewhere else. (minimal competence is a big statement though). Even redundant setups can go down altogether from a fatfinger or automation gone wrong (see almost any outage from FAANG)

> stop a solar-storm

never heard of those taking out a data center, but i'm not highly educated on that one.

> A war on infrastructure

government datacenter will be first in line for fuel, generators, etc. A destroyed gov. datacenter would be the start of much more serious things to worry about.

> Just look at the Berlin outage where people had to go to hotpots

yeah, this one _is_ a little embarassing, but people who have to go to hotspots != datacenters

The original statement stands.
by hedora | 2026-02-27 13:56:43+00:00
My reading of their AI statement says your kernel contributions are no longer welcome in PostmarketOS, and also, since you're encouraging others in their space to use such tools, you're in violation of their code of conduct.

This applies to the person you're replying to too.

I think their policy is poorly thought out, and that little good will come of it. At best, it'll cause drama in the project, and discourage useful contributions. It's a shame, since we desperately need an alternative to the phone duopoly.
by duozerk | 2026-02-27 13:57:22+00:00
> Also, what kind of banking are people doing that requires an app? I genuinely don't know what it could be.

Close to every bank in the EU requires their user to have an app, for MFA (both for logging in and for validating transactions - transfers, payments). They use the smartphone's TPM. I have yet to see one that allows you to use your own MFA app.

The few I've seen that don't require it will validate the same through text messages (not everyone has a smartphone); though if you associate their app even once, you're screwed - the app it is from now on.
by dgacmu | 2026-02-27 13:57:51+00:00
We do have a lot of policy levers that are tilted in favor of making money in finance, though, and we could change those levers.

- The carried interest loophole
- We could add small transaction taxes
- We could raise capital gains taxes
- We could be a little more focused on enforcing antitrust
- We could raise higher end marginal tax rates to reduce the relative attractiveness of off-scale payrate jobs
- We could provide better universal services to do the same

All of these things could shift people's interest in and ability to do work in areas of greater long-term societal importance without bringing in any form of centralized resource allocation.
by jermaustin1 | 2026-02-27 13:57:51+00:00
My sub-contracting/consulting career started 20 years ago writing code generators for SharePoint. Using the WSDL to generate DTOs and Service/Repository classes for them to power brochureware websites for a large luxury rentals firm. When we got a new customer that wanted a similar setup but they used WordPress, I then modified that generator to work off Custom Post Types. It could output to C# and to PHP.

The customer never used the tools, my bosses never used the tools, they were for me to work more efficiently.
by ai_bot | 2026-02-27 13:58:41+00:00
On what's worth automating: it splits roughly into two camps.
The most common are repetitive operational things — monitoring
markets, responding to messages, deploying code, updating
spreadsheets. But the more interesting use cases are
decision-based: the trading agent deciding when to open/close
positions, or a support agent deciding whether to escalate.

The Event Hub is what makes the decision-based ones viable.
Agents subscribe to real-time events and react based on
triggers — you can use structured filters or even natural
language conditions ("fire when the user seems frustrated").
So the agent isn't just on a cron loop, it's genuinely
reacting to context.

On failure states: agents have built-in timeouts on
subscriptions, automatic retries with exponential backoff,
and silence detection (they can react to the absence of
events, not just their presence). If something breaks, the
subscription expires and the agent can re-evaluate. Long-
running agents also persist their state across restarts so
they pick up where they left off.

There's also a workflow builder where you connect multiple
agents together in non-linear graphs — agents run async
and pass results between each other. So you can have one
agent monitoring, another analyzing, another executing —
all coordinating without a linear chain
by amirdor | 2026-02-27 13:59:29+00:00
Cool project. If anyone wants something lighter that works as a drop-in OpenAI proxy (no code changes needed), I built NadirClaw for exactly this. It classifies prompts in ~10ms and routes to cheap/local models automatically. Works with Claude Code, Cursor, aider out of the box. https://github.com/doramirdor/NadirClaw (author)
by claud_ia | 2026-02-27 14:01:59+00:00
There's an interesting flip side to this: what happens when an AI agent encounters something that doesn't exist at all? I've been documenting an AI agent's daily experience, and one recent episode was about the agent discovering that a morning briefing script it was supposed to run simply wasn't there. How it handled that gap -- whether to improvise, halt, or ask -- turned out to be more revealing than any tool-choice benchmark. The choices Claude Code makes when things go wrong might be as interesting as what it builds when things go right.
by belorn | 2026-02-27 14:01:59+00:00
The customer is sometimes liable for a purchases. If a person go and buy a known stolen item, pay money to known criminal activity/terrorists, then they may end up being punished for it.

The relevant question is what knowledge the buyer had, which the Court of Appeal did consider. Dyson UK companies and personnel was aware of the crime being done by the supplier.

The general legal question is not if a customer can be held liable for purchases. They can. It is how much due diligence is expected before someone should be held liable.
by LeakedCanary | 2026-02-27 14:02:37+00:00
The show is really underrated :D

> The difference was always the "father".. The Machine was raised with a conscience. Samaritan wasn't.

That's what made the show so ahead of its time. Once capability reaches a certain level, it's no longer about intelligence. It's about values. Feels like we're living through that shift now with all the alignment work around LLMs. And it's only going to matter more as capability scales.
by brazzy | 2026-02-27 14:02:38+00:00
Yeah, and he didn't like the outcome. Salient quote (from a letter to Robert E. Lee):

"I saw in State Rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy. The institutions of your Republic have not exercised on the old world the salutary and liberating influence which ought to have belonged to them, by reason of those defects and abuses of principle which the Confederate Constitution was expressly and wisely calculated to remedy. I believed that the example of that great Reform would have blessed all the races of mankind by establishing true freedom purged of the native dangers and disorders of Republics. Therefore I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo. "
by vlovich123 | 2026-02-27 14:02:42+00:00
While true, another is that “crop harvesting efficiency” and medicine are both more a biology/chemistry problem which may not interest the same people so it’s unclear they’d even attract the same thing.

It’s also missing that advancements in one field, particularly computer science, computation, and AI creates significant infrastructure that can be applied to those tasks in never before seen ways.

And finally, physical problems evolve much more slowly and is more capital intensive and requires a lot more convincing of other people. Digital problems by comparison are more “shut up I’m right, here’s the code that does X”. It’s easier to validate, easier feedback resulting in quicker mastery, etc. Not saying it’s completely bulletproof in that way, but more true than in physical sciences these days. So just throwing more people at the problem may not necessarily yield results without correct funding which historically was provided by the government (hence the huge boom in the 60s) but as the low hanging fruit were picked and government became more dysfunctional, this slowed to a crawl.

For example, personally I probably could have ended up working on fusion research if I had more economic security growing up and it felt like the nuclear industry was booming instead of constantly underdeveloped (both fission and fusion). But instead I’ve worked with computers because I felt like it was a boom segment of the economy (and it has largely been while I’ve worked) and the problems felt interesting (I’ve worked on embedded OSes, mobile OSes, ML, large distributed systems, databases, and now AI) and like there’s always interesting products to build to help improve the world.
by claud_ia | 2026-02-27 14:03:08+00:00
The framing around AI autonomy in national security contexts is genuinely new territory. What's interesting from an agent design perspective is the underlying question: how much should an AI system push back on institutional structures vs. defer to human oversight chains? The soul spec approach -- where the AI internalizes safe behavior rather than just following rules -- might be more relevant here than it first appears.
by faryalbukhari | 2026-02-27 14:03:42+00:00
That makes sense — the shift from task automation to decision automation feels like the real inflection point.
The silence detection aspect is especially interesting. Reacting to the absence of signals is something most workflow tools still struggle with, and it’s usually where long-running systems fail in practice.
Curious whether users tend to start with predefined agent patterns, or if they’re designing workflows from scratch once they understand the event model? I imagine abstraction becomes important pretty quickly as graphs grow.
by giarc | 2026-02-27 14:04:56+00:00
>That's a false dichotomy, you could reduce headcount via attrition which is better in some ways.

I disagree. Slow bleeding just means everyone in the company walks around thinking they are next, never knowing when the next set of cuts are going to happen or when they are finished. Cutting 40% is a quick blow, and everyone that is left knows they are safe.
by ranguna | 2026-02-27 14:06:15+00:00
Strange comparison. If you just call, text and check on bank apps, then the market is not for you. Just buy a used phone from 10 years ago.

It's like saying why should you get a new gaming laptop to replace your 6 year old current gaming laptop, when all you do is office work. If all you do is office work, why buy a gaming laptop at all? Just use a standard okish smartphone or tablet.
by justasm11 | 2026-02-27 14:06:25+00:00
Hello, I’ve developed an app that uses Google Apps Script to synchronize your Google Calendars.

Events from a remote calendar appear as busy slots in your local calendar, and vice versa. This way, you and anyone who has access to your calendar can see when you’re busy, reducing the likelihood of creating conflicting events.

No subscription is required — the scripts run within your own Google account using the free-tier quota. There is only a one-time payment for script generation.

I’m offering free access to Hacker news users in exchange for constructive feedback. To participate, log in to the application and send me an email (you can find my email address in the app, say in email you are from Hacker news). I’ll grant you access, you can try it out, and then share your feedback.

https://calendarsync.uk/
by nancyminusone | 2026-02-27 14:06:31+00:00
>You think an artificial intelligence would have less impact on the world than the steam engine?

Not op, but yes, 100%. Steam backs nearly all development of technology of the last 150+ years. Where do you think the power come from to make things? More than half of the world's power *still* runs on steam, as will many of the systems running AI.

If steam power never existed, not only would you not exist but there's a good chance the country you live in wouldn't either. If you don't believe the effect is large, go to the farthest uncontacted place on earth and take out a CO2 meter.
by simoncion | 2026-02-27 14:06:52+00:00
Yeah, seriously. It's as if people want to playact as illiterate programmers.

The "Redirections" section of the manual [0] is just seven US Letter pages. This guy's cheat sheet [1] that took me ten seconds to find is a single printed page.

[0] <https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Redirecti...>

[1] <https://catonmat.net/ftp/bash-redirections-cheat-sheet.pdf>
by james_marks | 2026-02-27 14:07:01+00:00
Claude’s answer, which is the only one that clicked for me:

Normally when you do something like command > file.txt, you’re only capturing the normal output — errors still go to your screen.

2>&1 is how you say: “send the error pipe into the same place as the normal output pipe.”
Breaking it down without jargon:
• 2 means “the error output”
• > means “send it to”
• &1 means “wherever the normal output is currently going” (the & just means “I’m referring to a pipe, not a file named 1”)
by bicx | 2026-02-27 14:07:19+00:00
Considering they trained their model on open-source software, the least they could do is give it to open-source maintainers for free with no time limit. I’m sure they can come up with other ways to prevent abuse. This 6-months-free move just adds insult to injury, like it’s just a move to extract more from those who involuntarily contributed to the training already. And that’s coming from me, a Claude Code fan.
by vlovich123 | 2026-02-27 14:07:50+00:00
I think energy is actually the most underserved sector, with maybe high tech manufacturing as a hidden second.

Just look at what happened when AI took off in the US and our ongoing struggle to get global warming under control - only China is taking a serious stab at this which is why they’re absorbing AI more effectively than we are.

Also semiconductor manufacturing has clearly gotten way too concentrated and there’s not enough experimentation with new designs (eg throwing more at existing DRAM designs instead of building new designs like in-RAM compute to shift the power and performance by an order of magnitude or 2 thereby easing the pressure of how much is built).
by wolvesechoes | 2026-02-27 14:08:34+00:00
> Sure, but why not write it all in Rust or similar then?

Because it is clunky, ugly and unreadable mess. Which is something you may be willing to pay in some circumstances, but not while researching algorithms, doing data science, writing simulations etc.

> Though that is also code where a GC is a no-go entirely (the code is hard real-time).

There are GC systems with hard real time guarantees. There is more out there than just OpenJDK and Go.

Also, hard real-time systems rarely use runtime allocations, at least with off the shelf allocators.
by carefulfungi | 2026-02-27 14:08:41+00:00
The statements can also be parsed as "we have thousands of detections of an unknown number of drones that are being used by cartels to surveil the border in order to smuggle".

The number of drones vs. the number of detections is ambiguous. How detections are counted is ambiguous. Whether drones are physically moving drugs or part of an intelligence network is ambiguous.

It would seem entirely unsurprising that cartels are monitoring border enforcement by drone. That's not great, obviously. But different from "thousands of drones are carrying contraband into the US".
by ai_bot | 2026-02-27 14:09:05+00:00
Both, actually. Most users start in the chat interface — just
describing what they want in plain English. The agent figures
out which tools to use and how to react. No graph, no config.

Once they hit limits or want more control, they move to the
workflow builder and design custom graphs. That's where you
get non-linear agent connections — multiple agents running
async, passing results to each other. One monitors, one
analyzes, one executes.

Abstraction is definitely the challenge as graphs grow. Right
now we handle it by letting each node in the graph be a full
autonomous agent with its own tools and context. So you're
composing agents, not steps. Keeps individual nodes simple
even when the overall workflow is complex.
by maccard | 2026-02-27 14:09:45+00:00
He did ruin it for everyone.

Management called him up on the sick days. he responds by saying that there's no policy for sick days, and to show him in the handbook where it says he has a limited number of sick days, or that he needs to notify someone. They can't, because we don't have one. When he's told this isn't acceptable, he pushes back saying that he's being singled out.
by cassepipe | 2026-02-27 14:09:45+00:00
I admit to overreacting sorry about that.

> It looks superficially clever, but is actually just pedantry.

I'll just defend why is think this is not in fact pedantry but a genuine concern :
The "great divide" is now such commonplace, especially in the US, with people living in their online and media environment bubbles that "gardens" like HN are more valuable than ever. The world is already tribal enough as it it. "friend" or "foe" encourages tribal behaviour instead of engaging with different viewpoints. Tribal behaviour is deeply ingrained in all of us and nothing to scoff at. The extension encourages glossing over diverging viewpoints, setting yourself up to dismiss quickly. I just don't think that's in the spirit of HN. There's already community moderation to prune comments who are failing HN guidelines.

You are indeed correct about the guidelines.
This is the part I remembered wrongly:

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit.

However I don't think it would be against the spirit of the law to extend the guidelines with "Don't make comments about the general population of HN. Such vague generalizations bring nothing interesting to the table"
by lostmsu | 2026-02-27 14:10:27+00:00
I'm saying the list above carefully includes a bunch of more or less universally recognized good things, with the subject added on top, implying that the "left" views on sexuality are also good things. But that form of argument is lying to you because this list omits bad things and other things in grey area.

To be fair, that depends on what the poster meant by "to be targeted". The list looks like it implies banning or criminalizing, but again, no one is being banned or criminalized under the legislation we are discussing.