MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Solid. Gamifying focused work without a gamer aesthetic
by victoormt | 2026-02-02 00:41:26+00:00
Hi HN,
I’m building Solid, a work-focused productivity app that uses gamification psychology without game-like visuals, points, or avatars.

The idea came from using tools like Habitica and focus apps, but feeling disconnected from the “gamer” aesthetic. Solid is designed for professionals who want motivation, clarity, and consistency, without distractions.

Right now this is an early landing page to validate interest. I’d love feedback on the concept, positioning, or whether this is something you’d actually use.

Thanks for taking a look.
Show HN: N.codes Capability Map – guardrails for agentic UI in production
by yungookim | 2026-02-02 00:41:34+00:00
Just released Capability Map, the guardrails layer for n.codes.

It auto-maps what your app can do (APIs, schemas, components) and tells the LLM exactly what is allowed to generate in production. The map merges APIs, schemas, UI components, constraints, and RBAC into a single “allowed actions” set, so agents can safely generate new features within your app’s boundaries from your user's prompt.

We call out four capability types: Entities, Actions, Queries, and Components.

How it differs from MCP or API docs:
- MCP is a protocol to access tools/resources, not app-specific boundaries or UI affordances.
- API docs describe endpoints for humans; they don’t capture permissions, product constraints, or frontend components.

Changelog: https://n.codes/changelog.html

Would love your feedback
by datenyan | 2026-02-02 00:41:47+00:00
To be fair though, I don't think it's unreasonable for the "average user" to expect that there are sensible defaults for the things they buy / install.

Obviously, there's a huge difference between something like a car and your OS of choice (specifically noting the 'of choice' part of that when it comes to installing a Linux distribution), but I feel as though the sentiment is roughly the same.
by varun_ch | 2026-02-02 00:41:52+00:00
built-in calculator apps are surprisingly underbaked... I'm surprised neither of the big two operating systems have elected to ship something comparable to a real calculator built in. It would be nice if we could preview the whole expression as we type it..

I use the NumWorks emulator app whenever I need something more advanced. It's pretty good https://www.numworks.com/simulator/
by victoormt | 2026-02-02 00:42:14+00:00
Hey HN

Solid is still very early — this is currently just a landing page to validate the idea before building the MVP.

The core concept is a daily work system that applies gamification psychology (clear goals, feedback loops, closure) without game mechanics like points, levels, or avatars. The goal is to make focused work feel structured and motivating, while keeping a calm, professional interface.

I’m especially interested in feedback around:

whether this differentiation makes sense

if the problem resonates with you

or if you’ve tried similar tools and why they didn’t stick

Happy to answer any questions and really appreciate any thoughts.
Auto-compaction felt fine. The invoice didn't
by parweb | 2026-02-02 00:42:31+00:00
I let Claude Code context accumulate and burned $2,000+ in tokens — without noticing any quality drop

I made a costly mistake with Claude Code: I let context accumulate across long sessions and relied on auto-compaction. What surprised me is that the output quality stayed good. I was happy with the results. There was no obvious “something is wrong” signal. The only thing that went wrong was the bill.

What happened
- I kept iterating in the same long-lived context.
- Auto-compaction kicked in when needed.
- Sonnet was used by default most of the time.
- From a UX perspective, everything felt fine.

Why this is dangerous
- There’s no clear quality degradation to warn you.
- Token usage grows invisibly in the background.
- Auto-compaction itself consumes a lot of tokens.
- You only realize something is wrong when you look at the invoice.

Root causes
- Long-lived context feels convenient, so you don’t reset it.
- Tooling doesn’t surface cost as a first-class signal.
- The mental model (“LLMs can remember my project”) is seductive but expensive.
- Defaulting to a large model makes the problem much worse.

What I changed
- One task = one fresh context.
- Externalized memory: project state lives in `context.md` / `decisions.md`, not in prompt history.
- Default to a smaller model; large models only for design/architecture.
- Diff-only outputs: no full file re-dumps.
- Disabled auto-compaction; summaries now live in docs.
- Added cost visibility: token counters and budget caps.

Takeaway
This isn’t about output quality degrading.
It’s about cost scaling quietly without feedback.
LLMs make it too easy to accumulate invisible technical debt in tokens.

If tooling doesn’t make cost visible, people will keep doing this.
by newAccount2025 | 2026-02-02 00:42:50+00:00
100%. Even beyond the direct incarceration costs and the opportunity cost of their lost contributions, there is also the cost of the whole apparatus for arresting and charging folks with crimes and trying them. The police department alone is more than 1/3 of our budget in Austin. Add courts and forensics and it’s 40%. And that’s still just the money part, to say nothing of the moral impact and humanity we throw away.
Show HN: Satori -  memory for your agents that connect to your business apps
by zarathustra333 | 2026-02-02 00:42:52+00:00
Graduating from NYU at the end of '24 its been a tricky job market to navigate so I decided to channel my energy into technically challenging and hopefully useful projects

https://www.usesatori.sh/

If you find this useful or you have any feedback let me know ! I plan to release an OSS version in the near future

And if anyone is hiring Product Eng / Deployed Eng -- Give me a shout :)
by techblueberry | 2026-02-02 00:43:51+00:00
I don't think it is, so many kids watch stranger things and ask if kids really did have that kind of freedom back then. I get why many things objectively better today, but suicide rates are up. I don't think people's mental health and happiness follow like objective statistics very well. And why would we assume it's true? This concept of "I wish I was. tween/ young teenager in the X0's" has probably only been true for like 100 years.
by atombender | 2026-02-02 00:44:12+00:00
It's reliable except when it's not. I'm using Mojave, and currently fighting a bug where a local snapshot gets stuck. When I list the local snapshots, I see the old one, then a gap of several days, and then additional snapshots.

From what I can tell, this snapshot is preventing space reclamation. The last month or so, I've constantly run out of disk space even when not doing anything special. As in actually run out of disk space — apps start to become unresponsive or crash, and I get warning boxes about low disk space. When you run low, the OS is supposed to reclaim the space used by snapshots, but I guess it doesn't happen,

The stuck snapshot can't be deleted with tmutil. I get a generic "failed to delete" error. The snapshot is actually mounted by the backup daemon, but unmount also fails. The only solution I've found is to reboot. Then I get 200-300GB back and the cycle starts again, with snapshots getting stuck again.

I'm considering updating to Tahoe just because there's a chance they fixed it in that release.
by bell-cot | 2026-02-02 00:44:41+00:00
???

Neither my comment, nor the prior one, had anything to do with fintech.

Concerning "innovation" in financial systems, done by relative outsiders, with little experience or incentive to keep the system stable: Given the track record, I'd argue that such innovations should either be outright banned, or limited to some tiny percentage of the relevant financial market. The world does not need more FTX's.
by BalinKing | 2026-02-02 00:44:54+00:00
My 2¢ from an interactive theorem proving perspective: In so-called computational type theory, typechecking is indeed allowed to be undecidable, and you get a lot of cool expressive power (e.g. well-behaved quotients and subtypes) as a result. This was one of the big ideas behind NuPRL back in the day, and Istari[0] more recently.

[0] www.istarilogic.org
Show HN: Humanitarian licensing and constitutional governance for AI agents
by genesalvatore | 2026-02-02 00:44:54+00:00
Yesterday I integrated the AOS Constitution (git-stamped Jan 1, 2026; https://aos-constitution.com) into a local-first agent (OpenClaw). The session later restarted with effectively zero retained context, so I asked the agent to review our humanitarian license with fresh eyes. It caught an overclaim ("uses automated monitoring" before we'd actually built monitoring). We fixed it in v1.0.1 the same day.

I'm Gene (founder of AOS). This is a constitutional governance toolkit + a humanitarian, source-available license for tool-using AI agents.

Repo: https://github.com/genesalvatore/aos-openclaw-constitutional
License: https://github.com/genesalvatore/aos-openclaw-constitutional...
License checker: https://aos-license-checker.com/

What it includes:
- deterministic risk classification + policy evaluation (deny/confirm/allow)
- signing/verification scaffolding + templates
- humanitarian license with permanent downstream restrictions:
- 40 prohibited categories (incl. absolute military prohibition, even "defensive")
- copyleft-style inheritance (prevents license stripping)
- commercial audit/self-cert requirements
- patent separation (Section 5)

Controversy upfront: this is NOT OSI open source. It's source-available with explicit humanitarian values (no military use / weaponization). That's deliberate.

Why I'm posting: tool-using agents need governance before they're deployed at scale. We're trying to make governance concrete and auditable (not "prompt-based ethics").

Questions/criticism welcome — we're learning in public.
by busyant | 2026-02-02 00:45:35+00:00
> I am willing to wager the overwhelming majority of extant flagrant errors are due to humans making shit up

In general, I agree, but I wouldn't want to ascribe malfeasance ("making shit up") as the dominant problem.

I've seen two types of problems with references.

1. The reference is dead, which means I can't verify or refute the statement in the Wikipedia article. If I see that, I simply remove both the assertion and the reference from the wiki article.

2. The reference is live, but it almost confirms the statement in the wikipedia article, but whoever put it there over-interpreted the information in the reference. In that case, I correct the statement in the article, but I keep the ref.

Those are the two types of reference errors that I've come across.

And, yes, I've come across these types of errors long before LLMs.
by sebastos | 2026-02-02 00:46:11+00:00
As Douglas Adams and xkcd #1227 have pointed out, the older generations have complained about this sort of thing since Plato. However, I do not believe this observation settles the matter, because it does not seriously contend with the null hypothesis: that we really have been steadily enshittifying the human experience since Plato.

Who has the right of it? Do the new generations simply not know what they are missing. Or is there something in human nature that makes us unavoidably crotchety as we get older and, thus, not to be taken too seriously? In my opinion, it is simply an open mystery.

On the one hand, many tangible, measurable things have improved over the last 2000 years, or, indeed, since the 90's. Steven Pinker has made this point somewhat convincingly by looking at unambiguously positive things like reduced infant mortality.

On the other hand, every single generation can give detailed accounts of how much more real and alive and authentic the world was a few decades ago. The accounts have similarities across the generations, but they are also rooted in specifics. To argue that we're all mis-remembering or failing to appreciate what the new decade has to offer is to insist on a rather fantastic level of self-doubt. If our entire lived experience is this untrustworthy, it kind of makes it impossible to rule on anything - good OR bad. Why should we default to trusting the younger generation?

I think the surrounding technological context of our age has brought this long-simmering matter to a boil. Now that our electronic communication is so sophisticated that we can essentially build "anything", it starts to re-focus our attention from "CAN we build it" to "SHOULD we build it". This question about digital society is complementary to the broader, long-standing civilizational question. Have the trillions of hours the human race has expended shaping our society resulted in _better_ life, or just life with a deeper tech tree?

Mostly, I just wish people would acknowledge that it is an unresolved debate and take it seriously. It is critical to understanding what it is worth spending our time on, and it is the kernel of many comparatively superficial disagreements (e.g. the red-blue culture war in US politics).
by the_real_cher | 2026-02-02 00:46:28+00:00
> the biggest downside of the PX adapter is that it gets really hot, like not touchable hot. Sometimes, either the network connection silently disappeared or (sadly) my Mac crashed with a kernel panic in the network driver. Apple has assured me that this was not a security issue. Other than that, the PX seems to do the job.

Made me chuckle.
by matheusmoreira | 2026-02-02 00:46:56+00:00
It's not complex at all. It's just violence. People are doing things you don't want them to do, so you do something to make them stop. Pretty standard.

If they can muster defiance, it's only because you weren't violent enough. If someone is defiant enough to play probability games with you, just punish them 100% of the time instead, even if they did nothing. He was probably doing it some other time where you didn't catch him, so it's warranted.

There's always someone willing to escalate things further. Things will escalate until someone discovers their limits and back down. Consequences range from being quietly hated, to being ostracized, to being actively fucked with, to being beaten up, to being straight up killed.

Smart people don't fuck around and find out. They check their behavior so that they don't step on other people's toes for no reason. Violence very often comes with instructions on how to avoid it. Don't do this, and I won't do that. All they have to do is listen and follow the instructions.

The outcome where the obnoxious neighbor learns his lesson and stops his bad behavior is the good ending. The behavior stops, the situation de-escalates and peace is restored.
by bitwize | 2026-02-02 00:47:15+00:00
I remember in the user manual for some piece of software—it may have been filePro—there was a note like "If you're on a single user system like an IBM PC, blah. If you're on a multiuser system like the NCR Tower, blart." Being just a kid, I thought the NCR Tower sounded tremendously powerful. To be honest, it still seems kind of impressive for its day.
by spartanatreyu | 2026-02-02 00:47:29+00:00
I'm not convinced by jujutsu yet.

If I'm using git for version control, I'm going to use the Fork client (fork.dev) since it essentially replaces git's UI already.

And in a few years if I'm in the position where we want to switch away from git, I'd probably be looking at pijul.

But maybe that will change if jujutsu gets an open source non-git-based backend.
by narmiouh | 2026-02-02 00:48:37+00:00
I feel like a lot of non technical people who are vibe coding or vibe using these models, focus on hallucinations and believe that as the hallucinations are reduced in benchmarks, and over estimate their ability to create safe prompts that will keep these models in line.

I think most people fail to estimate the real threat that malicious prompts can cause because it is not that common, its like when credit cards were launched, cc fraud and the various ways it could be perpetrated followed not soon after. The real threats aren’t visible yet but rest assured there are actors working to take advantage and many unfortunate examples will be seen before general awareness and precaution will prevail….
by vunderba | 2026-02-02 00:48:54+00:00
Please familiarize yourself with HN rules regarding Show posts:

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

Off topic: blog posts, sign-up pages, newsletters, lists, and other reading material. Those can't be tried out, so can't be Show HNs. Make a regular submission instead.

As for feedback:

1. The landing page is pretty barebones so it's difficult to concretely see what you're offering people.

2. Solid is the name of an extremely popular JS framework. Not a deal breaker, just something you should keep in mind.
by Pinkus77 | 2026-02-02 00:50:15+00:00
Smart Code Library is a portable, single-file snippet/command manager for multi-language workflows (R, Python, SQL, Shell, etc.). It turns saved snippets into reusable templates via built-in variables, so you can adapt scripts quickly without rewriting the same patterns (or repeatedly prompting an AI for boilerplate). It is local-first and privacy-friendly: it runs entirely in the browser and stores data in local storage (no accounts, no backend). Compared to many alternatives, it is intentionally simple and lightweight, focusing on fast capture, organization, and reuse rather than complex accounts, sync, or heavy features. Editing is done in a Monaco-powered editor (VS Code-like), making it suitable for maintaining a personal library of “known-good” commands you can reuse across projects.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-02-02 00:50:17+00:00
What I find really amazing is that the same ones who kept saying that cars were/are wasteful and that kept making fun of cryptocurrencies and complaining about the high energy usage to mine Bitcoin are now head first spending $$$ on the most energy intensive endeavour the human race ever invented: AI.

I mean: there are literally people spending $200 and more per month to have their personal, a bit schizophrenic, assistant engage moreover in conspicuous consumption for them.

Now as to my take on it: I think energy, when it comes to 8 billion humans, is basically infinite so I think it's only a matter of converting enough of that energy that either is or reaches our planet into a usable form. So I don't mind energy consumption.

But it'd be nice if could we at least have those who use AI not being hypocrites and stop criticizing Bitcoin mining and ICE cars? (by ICE I mean "Internal Combustion Engine" in case you thought I was talking about other kind of cars)

From now on you're only allowed to criticize ICE cars and Bitcoin mining if you don't use AI.
by pvillano | 2026-02-02 00:50:48+00:00
This stack exchange answer talks about the importance of decidability in type checking

https://langdev.stackexchange.com/a/2072

My interpretation

Decidability is of academic interest, and might be a hint if something is feasible.

But there are (1) ways of sidestepping undecidability, e.g. A valid C++/Rust program is one for which the typechecker terminates in x steps without overflowing the stack

And (2) things which are decidable, but physically impossible to calculate, e.g the last digit of the 10^10^10 th prime

What matters is being able to reject all incorrect programs, and accept most human written valid programs
by JimTheMan | 2026-02-02 00:50:59+00:00
Junkie by William S Burrough, while not of the beatnik genre is an excellent read.

It's set in the exact same time and place, and I think parallels the destructive nature of the Road in a more a direct way.

I think the Road is actually best read once as a teenager, once at midlife. The perspective change is enormous.
by steveBK123 | 2026-02-02 00:51:12+00:00
Great story and reminds me how good I have it in my current apartment re: noise.

In NYC it is really a roll of the dice, and it doesn't matter if you rent or own in a condo/coop. In some ways renting is probably better since you can simply leave at end of lease (or break lease) without incurring huge financial costs.

In 2 of the 4 apartments I've lived over 20 years I have had underemployed neighbors who threw parties and/or watched TV on maximum volume weekdays at 4am. Wish I knew about the TV-B-Gone back in the bad TV neighbors days.

In some ways I think we've all gone soft as a society and have "broken windows policing" type rules we are reluctant to enforce, which allows the inconsiderate to infringe with impunity. Apartment buildings usually have house rules but they are generally weak on enforcement. Both of my bad neighbor problems were large enough problems that half the building was up in arms and it still took years to resolve.
by undersuit | 2026-02-02 00:51:20+00:00
PCI-E lanes for consumers. Gigabit would saturate the PCI bus, but once you're on PCI-E you only need to give it 1 lane, usually off the chipset.

Servers had a reason to spend for the 10G, 25G and 40G cards which used 4 lanes.

There are 10 Gigabit chips that can run off of one PCI-E 4.0 lane now and the 2.5G and 5G speeds are supported(802.3bz).
by hedora | 2026-02-02 00:51:54+00:00
I wonder if this can store any heat or just heat pump heat. If it can store any heat, it would help a lot to further reduce heating costs in our modern energy efficient house.

Sometimes, in the winter, we get too much solar forcing, so if we don’t heat all, it can be 85F in the day in the house, but 60-65 at night. (We open the windows during the day, and don’t always close them at exactly the right time at night.)
by anonymars | 2026-02-02 00:52:18+00:00
I'd almost say most companies live or die off their marketing. One could argue that understanding your customer as well as or better than they understand themselves is a strength.

To wit, some people do value form over function. Some people do prefer a safe, curated walled garden.

I am not among them--I say this as someone who cannot stand using most Apple products for more than a minute. But I respect what they offer(ed) and for some people even recommended them. (Now I'm less sure because it seems like everything tech has gone to shit, but I can't tell if that's just "old man yells at cloud" or what)

Ideally there would be enough competition for us all to find what we're looking for. I think anticompetitive behavior is a worse sin
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-02 00:53:24+00:00
I am 51 and a Gen X. I did my part, I voted for policies to increase the social safety net, universal healthcare, etc.

This is the world that people wanted. I have the Ben Kenobi plan, I’m going to disappear somewhere and when the evil empire comes for me, just give up and die and then it becomes the younger people’s problem.