MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sp1nningaway | 2026-02-18 04:48:03+00:00
Here is a very real example of how an LLM can at least save, if not create jobs, and also not take a programmers job:

I work for a cash-strapped nonprofit. We have a business idea that can scale up a service we already offer. The new product is going to need coding, possibly a full-scale app. We don't have any capacity to do it in-house and don't have an easy way to find or afford vendor that can work on this somewhat niche product.

I don't have the time to help develop this product but I'm VERY confident an LLM will be able to deliver what we need faster and at a lower cost than a contractor. This will save money we couldn't afford to gamble on an untested product AND potentially create several positions that don't currently exist in our org to support the new product.
by stackghost | 2026-02-18 04:48:30+00:00
What I like about git-and-email-patches is the barrier to entry.

I think it's dwm that explicitly advertises a small and elitist userbase as a feature/design goal. I feel like mailing lists as a workflow serve a similar purpose, even if unintentionally.

With the advent of AI slop as pull request I think I'm gravitating to platforms with a higher barrier to entry, not lower.
by twelve40 | 2026-02-18 04:48:54+00:00
lol you can call it crap if it makes you feel better, but McDonalds was replaced by the same vendors, making the same stuff sourced mostly locally as before, using the same processes that McDonalds used, they just don't send their revenue to the US anymore. Same for Ikea (majority of stuff sold at Ikea was sourced locally and continues under local brands), same for Starbucks - Shokoladnitsa is subjectively better and keeps all the $$ locally, but whatever. The level of myths and delusions people confidently post here on this topic is truly impressive.
by vlovich123 | 2026-02-18 04:48:56+00:00
I can see the argument if you’re familiar with poetry terms, then of course that naming makes sense, but I think proper names occupy a different part of the brain for people which inhibits the ability to make that connection. But also the jump from sonnet to opus is not as big as haiku to sonnet even though the names might imply such a jump (17 syllables -> 14 lines -> multi page masterpiece does not capture the difference between the models)
by yearolinuxdsktp | 2026-02-18 04:50:37+00:00
Signing in is broken and, worse, returning unexpected results, such as family accounts that have never been referenced in the app (now showing up as a profile you can sign in to). The app is completely busted on Apple TV.

I couldn’t find a YouTube status page, so there is zero official information, as millions using YouTube apparently don’t deserve any answers. But as a premium subscriber I really would like to have some.
by Incipient | 2026-02-18 04:50:38+00:00
China is absolutely crushing everyone mostly across the board in technology these days. It's comical today, but will just be embarrassing soon.

The only bit visually we see China a little behind is AI but I suspect they have much better closed/unreleased models, and the fab/chip space, but they'll close that gap in a short few years I'd expect.
by Brian_K_White | 2026-02-18 04:51:39+00:00
And the forks network display.

Find a project, find out if it's the original or a fork, and either way, find all the other possibly more relevant forks. Maybe the original is actually derelict but 2 others are current. Or just forks with significant different features, etc. Find all the oddball individual small fixes or hacks, so even if you don't want to use someone's fork you may still like to pluck the one change they made to theirs.

I was going to also say the search but probably that can be had about the same just in regular google, at least for searching project names and docs to find the simple existence of projects. But maybe the code search is still only within github.
by yes_really | 2026-02-18 04:52:16+00:00
Unfortunately there is an unimaginable amount of ignorance on the internet so I think it's good to be very explicit about even the most basic things. I would also reply if it were some other insane comment saying that e.g. the Holocaust didn't happen or that "Hitler was right".

Now can you be explicit about what you are implying? You are implying that I found the comment persuasive. If I chastised some absurd comment saying that the Holocaust didn't happened or that "Hitler was right", would you say that implies I actually think those things are true?
by famouswaffles | 2026-02-18 04:52:45+00:00
It's a strange ask. Who's going to quantify what is 'amazing open source work'?

4% for a single tool used in a particular way (many are out there using AI tools in a way that doesn't make it clear the code was AI authored) is an incredible amount. Don't see how you can look at that and see 'not enough'.

The vast majority of people using these tools aren't announcing it to the world. Why would they ? They use it, it works and that's that.
by palmotea | 2026-02-18 04:52:45+00:00
> but we're gonna take the Model S and X production space in our Fremont factory and convert that into an Optimus factory, which will... with the long-term goal of having 1 million units a year of Optimus robots in the current S/X space in Fremont."

I don't know how well that's going to work out for them. I saw these robots (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVX6vq0RSnY) on the Chinese New Year Gala, and they look way more dexterous than any Optimus video I've ever seen.
by mikestorrent | 2026-02-18 04:52:51+00:00
Consider just fast-forwarding past a scene you can't handle. Like many shows, it takes a few episodes before the actors truly understand their characters.

The feeling you're experiencing has a name: it's called "cringe". I can't watch Frasier for more than about half an episode because of it. Or I Love Lucy... same problem. But Seinfeld, which has plenty of the same humour mechanic, always seems to manage to stay just below the threshold for me.

Halt and Catch Fire is really, really good. Please trust us. Give it another shot. Skip forward a bit when you feel the need to. Skip the first episode entirely and just read a synopsis if you need to.
by elzbardico | 2026-02-18 04:53:10+00:00
Most of us had been laid-off at some moment in our careers, and frankly, it always seem like you're unemployable. This is not true in the majority of cases.

This kind of feeling is mostly just our old minds that cannot stop identifying this situation as social rejection or being shunned off; both things amongst the most terrible events that can happen to social primates like us.
by docjay | 2026-02-18 04:54:35+00:00
It really depends on how deep you want to go.

1. Just jazz up and expand on a simple prompt.

2. A full context deficiency analysis and multiple question interview system to bounds check and restructure your prompt into your ‘goal’.

3. Realizing that what looks like a good human prompt is not the same as what functions as a good ‘next token’ prompt.

If you just want #1:

import dspy

class EnhancePrompt(dspy.Signature):

"""Assemble the final enhanced prompt from all gathered context"""

essential_context: str = dspy.InputField(desc="All essential context and requirements")

original_request: str = dspy.InputField(desc="The user's original request")

enhanced: str = dspy.OutputField(desc="Complete, detailed, unambiguous prompt. Omit politeness markers. You must limit all numbered lists to a maximum of 3 items.")

def enhance_prompt(prompt: str, temperature: float = 0.2) -> str:

with dspy.context(lm=dspy.LM("_MODEL_", temperature=temperature)): return dspy.ChainOfThought(EnhancePrompt)(essential_context=f"Direct enhancement request: {prompt}", original_request=prompt).enhanced

res = enhance_prompt("Read bigfile.py and explain the do_math() function.")

print(res)

Read the file `bigfile.py` and provide a detailed explanation of the `do_math()` function. Your explanation should cover:

1. The function's purpose and what it accomplishes

2. The input parameters it accepts and the output/return value it produces

3. The step-by-step logic and algorithm used within the function

Include relevant code snippets when explaining key parts of the implementation.
by maxlybbert | 2026-02-18 04:54:53+00:00
The people who wrote the constitution had plenty of experience with the First and Second Continental Congresses, and the Congress set up by the Articles of Confederation. And Parliament, and state legislatures. They both loved and feared democracy. Not everything in the constitution is meant to be democratic.

Senators were originally appointed by state governments to prevent the federal government from slowly weakening the states ( https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S1-2-3/A... “To further allay Anti-Federalist concerns regarding concentrated federal power in Congress, the Federalists emphasized that bicameralism, which lodged legislative power directly in the state governments through equal representation in the Senate, would serve to restrain, separate, and check federal power”). That’s not really “democratic.”

In grade school, we focused on the fact that states with small populations weren’t enthusiastic about letting larger states set national policy. Sure, New York would have been happy to have more influence in both the House and the Senate than any other state, but Rhode Island, Delaware, and Connecticut weren’t going to sign under those terms. Horse trading to get them to join wasn’t “democratic” either, but they wouldn’t have joined any other way.
by ZaneHam | 2026-02-18 04:55:02+00:00
Oh gosh, Emdashes are already ruined for me and now I can't use that to? I've already had to drop boldface in some of my writings because it's become prolific too.

This is also just what I intentionally avoided when making this by the way. I don't really know how else to phrase this because LLVM and HIP are quite prolific in the compiler/GPU world it seems.
by tyre | 2026-02-18 04:56:22+00:00
I wasn't thinking about tests, but yes those help for iteration. Deployment, version management, debugging things like compilation errors or package version mismatch, etc.

I've done enough of this in my career that I can do it, but I don't want to. It's not fun. Having an LLM iterate on that stuff is really nice. Especially to get a scaffolding that I can then read and learn from.

For example, I recently was using an eInk screen for the first time and wanting to stream the currently playing album art to it. Claude made it so, so, so much easier to troubleshoot.
by TurdF3rguson | 2026-02-18 04:58:27+00:00
Except that Mr Robot was always planned that way, you can go back and see references to what's revealed in the final episodes as early as the pilot. Things are revealed at the end of S1 that make you have to re-evaluate what you've seen so far. The same is probably even more true for S4.

Maybe that's a challenge for the audience to stay with it, but it's definitely worth it for the payoff.

And those s04 episode titles matching http error codes? That might be the most masterful thing I've ever seen pulled off from a TV show.
by toast0 | 2026-02-18 04:59:00+00:00
Because you can is a pretty traditional reason.

Zig is supposed to be an improvement upon C, so doing C things with it seems reasonable.

Kind of neat that there's no need for a separate assembly file although there is inline assembly. Might get better (or worse) syntax support for separate assembly files? But it doesn't make a big difference until there's more features that need it (interrupts, threads/processes and maintaining their stacks, syscalls, starting other processors, etc)
by tiltowait | 2026-02-18 04:59:24+00:00
The raft of outages lately (my company was disrupted by I think four last week?) have certainly (and deservedly) created some pent-up frustration. I'm personally frustrated with its poor performance on Safari.

Overall, though, it's ... fine. That's all. A little worse than it used to be, which is frustrating, but certainly nowhere near unusable. I stood up my own forge and mirror some repos to it. The performance is almost comically better. I know it's not a fair comparison: I have only one user. On the other hand, I'm on a 9-year-old Xeon located geographically farther from me than GitHub's servers.
by politelemon | 2026-02-18 04:59:26+00:00
You are assuming that we all work on the same tasks and should have exactly the same experience with it, which is it course far from the truth. It's probably best to start with that base assumption and work on the implications from there.

As for the last example, for all the money being spent on this area, if someone is expected to perform a workflow based on the kind of question they're supposed to ask, that's a failure in the packaging and discoverability aspect of the product, the leaky abstraction only helps some of us who know why it's there.
by snthpy | 2026-02-18 05:00:46+00:00
This, so much this!

I have the same issue with Google Sheets. Non-experts don't understand how much of an impediment this is.

People need to watch a Shrekli video on YouTube to see how much some of us rely on the keyboard shortcuts.

You wouldn't expect a Vim user to just abandon their muscle memory and just switch to Emacs.
Show HN: Mersel AI – we make websites readable by ChatGPT/Perplexity (GEO)
by wujosephjw | 2026-02-18 05:00:53+00:00
Three months ago I posted a batch AI image tool here. I pivoted after noticing something odd with ecommerce clients.

AI agents were visiting their sites but not citing them.

The reason is structural. LLMs parse raw HTML and often skip JavaScript-rendered content. Reviews inside Yotpo or Judge.me widgets? Invisible. Product data buried in React? Frequently misread or skipped.

So you can rank well on Google and still barely exist in AI answers.

A few numbers that changed my view:

80% of URLs cited by ChatGPT do not rank in Google’s top 100 (Ahrefs)

ChatGPT referral traffic converts at 15.9% vs 1.76% for Google organic

AI referral traffic to US retail grew 4,700% YoY (Adobe, mid-2025)

We started building Mersel AI to address this. It adds a machine-readable layer on top of existing sites using structured data and server-side HTML. No visual changes. No redesign. We also write GEO-optimized content.

Early stage, a handful of paying brands, seeing 2 to 5x increases in AI citations in the first few weeks.

Curious if others here are seeing AI traffic behave differently from organic.
by majormajor | 2026-02-18 05:01:23+00:00
> Their goal is to monopolize labor for anything that has to do with i/o on a computer, which is way more than SWE. Its simple, this technology literally cannot create new jobs it simply can cause one engineer (or any worker whos job has to do with computer i/o) to do the work of 3, therefore allowing you to replace workers (and overwork the ones you keep). Companies don't need "more work" half the "features"/"products" that companies produce is already just extra. They can get rid of 1/3-2/3s of their labor and make the same amount of money, why wouldn't they.

Most companies have "want to do" lists much longer than what actually gets done.

I think the question for many will be is it actually useful to do that. For instance, there's only so much feature-rollout/user-interface churn that users will tolerate for software products. Or, for a non-software company that has had a backlog full of things like "investigate and find a new ERP system", how long will that backlog be able to keep being populated.
by beart | 2026-02-18 05:01:58+00:00
> Who will check all this?

The answer to that, for some, is more AI.

I had a peer explain that the PRs created by AI are now too large and difficult to understand. They were concerned that bugs would crop up after merging the code. Their solution, was to use another AI to review the code... However, this did not solve the problem of not knowing what the code does. They had a solution for that as well... ask AI to prepare a quiz and then deliver it to the engineer to check their understanding of the code.

The question was asked - does using AI mean best-practices should no longer be followed? There were some in the conversation who answered, "probably yes".

> Who will check all this?

So yeah, I think the real answer to that is... no one.
by Doc_Dre | 2026-02-18 05:02:49+00:00
Hey HN,

I built OdinForge (https://www.odinforgeai.com) — a security validation tool that autonomously discovers vulnerabilities across your infrastructure, cloud, network, and web apps, then chains them into breach paths showing how an attacker would actually compromise your environment.

The problem I kept running into: vulnerability scanners give you a list of 800 CVEs with no context. Annual pentests cost $50-200K and the report is stale within weeks. BAS tools like AttackIQ run scripted playbooks that test whether your SIEM detects known signatures — useful, but not the same as proving an attacker can actually get in.

OdinForge takes a different approach — it discovers real exploitable weaknesses and autonomously determines how to chain them together, from initial access through lateral movement to whatever you'd consider "game over" in your environment. The output is an interactive attack graph, not a PDF.

Some technical decisions that might interest this crowd:

- Agentless, black-box — we attack from the outside in, like a real adversary
- Multi-tenant with row-level security isolation (Postgres RLS, not application-level filtering)
- Decoupled architecture — API server and BullMQ workers run in separate containers, communicate via Redis pub/sub
- Interactive breach chain visualization rendered on HTML5 Canvas
- Covers infra, cloud (AWS/Azure/GCP), network, web apps, and APIs from one platform

What it doesn't do (being honest): It's not going to replace a skilled red team doing social engineering and physical access. It's automated technical validation — think of it as a tireless junior pentester that runs 24/7 and never forgets to check something.

I also wrote honest comparison pages against the incumbents:
- vs Pentera ($100K+/yr, 500-IP minimum): https://www.odinforgeai.com/compare/pentera
- vs NodeZero/Horizon3.ai (opaque pricing): https://www.odinforgeai.com/compare/nodezero
- vs AttackIQ (simulation, not exploitation): https://www.odinforgeai.com/compare/attackiq

Free 14-day trial, no credit card. Would genuinely appreciate technical feedback — especially on the breach chaining approach and where you see gaps.
by musicale | 2026-02-18 05:03:50+00:00
Technical history or "internal history" is great. Regular historians writing "external history" of computing tend to focus on certain topics, such as business and economic issues, politics, personalities, or occasionally social impact, while omitting the details of the technology itself - which are often of great interest to practitioners, and which help us understand why things happen to work the way they do.

Of course people who experienced things firsthand often have interesting personal as well as technical insight. CHM's oral histories often provide a combination of both. I also always enjoy:

https://www.folklore.org/Busy_Being_Born.html
by mos87 | 2026-02-18 05:04:15+00:00
>Try running any part of the systemd software suite on an openrc system and see how that works out?

Well from this POV it's kinda openrc's problem if it doesn't. What about trying to run any part of the Openrc software suite on an Upstart system? The question why would anyone sane want to is rhetorical tho...

Why obsessing over whether systemd is monolithic and in what measure anyway? There certainly ARE optional systemd parts. So it's correct to say it's not entirely monolithic.
by Apocryphon | 2026-02-18 05:04:15+00:00
I've heard of Season 1 described as "Don Draper teaming up with Walter White", which makes it sound far more juicy than it is. The entire show gets way into the melodrama of the characters' personal lives, but S1 is no better than the rest in terms of that; it's strongest when the personal melodrama is rooted in the tech, like Joe's self-sabotage of their COMDEX demo followed by the fateful realization in the hotel room of their doom. There's a really great article in Grantland about HCF, Silicon Valley, and Microserfs by Douglas Coupland which points out that these characters are not great men, because they are but footnotes of history:

> The story twists again: Joe loses his nerve. The Giant goes to market as a regular old fast/cheap PC. Then, in a Comdex hotel room darkened as if for a séance, Joe comes face-to-face with his first Macintosh, and realizes he’s made the wrong call: “It speaks,” he says, his voice full of wonder and dread. We realize we’ve spent the better part of a season watching these characters fail — that Gordon and Joe aren’t going to become the Jobs and Wozniak of this world because Jobs and Wozniak are the Jobs and Wozniak of this world.

https://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/silicon-valley-ha...

Cameron is just sort of an unstable tortured genius with a lot of baggage, and while Donna ends up being the responsible "den mother", it is really far from girlbossing, and rather trivializes those seasons and the characters to put it in such a way. And Joe does not take a backseat at all! He ends up being the main foil for most of the show, which is a really interesting turn for the character!

I do think Gordon gets sidelined (with a debilitating disease, no less!) far too easily. But then he's also sort of doomed to be a footnote, his fate is just all the more tragic for it.
Show HN: m6502, a 6502 CPU for FPGAs and Tiny Tapeout
by chrismoos | 2026-02-18 05:05:22+00:00
Hey HN,

Recently built an Apple II emulator and at the same time was getting into Tiny Tapeout and decided it would be cool to build a cycle-accurate 6502 CPU and an MCU for it. It's cycle accurate and the core itself should be 100% compatible with a stock MOS 6502 (would need to still test this though!).

Tested on some FPGAs (fomu, ulx3s) and works great, hoping to get it taped out in the upcoming IHP26a shuttle.

Also as part of the project I built a bus multiplexer to allow memory/bus access from an RP2040 to work around the limited pin count on Tiny Tapeout. This let's you load up programs on RP2040 and the CPU can read/write from it.
by srean | 2026-02-18 05:05:42+00:00
Any Fortran folks around ?

Since old Fortran does not have function pointers I used to wonder how does one write gradient descent routine for a user defined function in Fortran.

In other languages, one typically passes the user defined function and it's gradient to the routine as callbacks, so that the routine can call them at will.

It was a moment of great amusement and joy (grinning like a silly kid) when I learned how Fortran did it. It was through a pared down form of a coroutine. Inversion of control.

The gradient descent routine would effectively suspend and 'return' with a flag indicating that it needs the user defined function computed, or the gradient function computed.

These are computed outside and then the routine is called again with these recently computed values. At this point it resumes from where it had yielded. Pretty neat.

The routine's return value indicated whether it is done, or that it is suspended and expects to be called again to resume.

Now I don't remember if the suspended state was stored transparently by the run time, or explicitly in the arguments of the routine (pass by reference, I think), or whether the local, routine specific 'program counter' was managed explicitly or transparently by the compiler and run time.