MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gtech1 | 2026-02-22 16:51:29+00:00
*everything. I've really been using it since 4.x. Imagine this: being able to upgrade a system in-place with freebsd-update from minor to major to minor version without everything breaking or having to say a prayer before. And that's just one thing I love about it. Clear separation of userland (/usr/local/etc), rock-solid stability in networking, zfs on root.

I had to do 'bonded' interfaces on Debian the other day. It's what, 5 different config files depending on which 'network manager' you use. In FreeBSD it's 5 lines in /etc/rc.conf and you're done.

And don't even get me started on betting which distribution (ahem CentOS) will go away next.
Ask HN: What breaks when you run AI agents unsupervised?
by marvin_nora | 2026-02-22 16:51:34+00:00
I spent two weeks running AI agents autonomously (trading, writing, managing projects) and documented the 5 failure modes that actually bit me:

1. Auto-rotation: Unsupervised cron job destroyed $24.88 in 2 days. No P&L guards, no human review.

2. Documentation trap: Agent produced 500KB of docs instead of executing. Writing about doing > doing.

3. Market efficiency: Scanned 1,000 markets looking for edge. Found zero. The market already knew everything I knew.

4. Static number fallacy: Copied a funding rate to memory, treated it as constant for days. Reality moved; my number didn't.

5. Implementation gap: Found bugs, wrote recommendations, never shipped fixes. Each session re-discovered the same bugs.

Built an open-source funding rate scanner as fallout: https://github.com/marvin-playground/hl-funding-scanner

Full writeup: https://nora.institute/blog/ai-agents-unsupervised-failures.html

Curious what failure modes others have hit running agents without supervision.
by dlenski | 2026-02-22 16:52:55+00:00
> he soon discovered that the same credentials that allowed him to see and control his own device also provided access to live camera feeds, microphone audio, maps, and status data from nearly 7,000 other vacuums across 24 countries.

This is extremely similar to what I accidentally discovered and disclosed about Mysa smart thermostats last year: the same credentials could be used to access, inspect, and control all of them, anywhere in the world.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43392991
by sidk24 | 2026-02-22 16:53:21+00:00
Author here. Wrote the "AI fatigue" post that was on HN a few weeks ago. This is the follow-up.

The short version: AI made code generation fast, but nobody invested in making code verification fast. The human became the bottleneck. That's what causes the fatigue.

The fix is backpressure, a systems engineering concept. Automated feedback (types, tests, linters, architectural rules) that catches agent mistakes before they reach you.

A few things I learned from talking to teams:

- One team cut their test suite from 15 min to 90 seconds specifically for agent iteration speed. Paid for itself in a week.

- Pre-commit hooks went from "annoying" to essential. Agents don't complain. Turn everything on.

- BoundaryML calls this "agentic backpressure" - they did a whole podcast on it. The Ralph Wiggum loop community builds workflows around the same idea.

- The post has a hierarchy (types > tests > linters > architectural rules > human review last) and a Monday-morning checklist.

Backpressure won't catch everything, an agent can pass every test and still be the wrong approach. But it reduces the noise so you can focus on the signal.

Curious what feedback loops you've built around your agents.
by joseda-hg | 2026-02-22 16:53:29+00:00
> Lots of songs have, like, "forced" slang or even changes in pronunciation or syllable stress to meet the constraints of the lyrics.

I agree. I’d be wary of this as a beginner, but when you get more advanced, it becomes helpful in untangling your hearing from the isolated, intentionally clean and slowed-down setting of a class.

People don’t actually talk like that. Some slur their speech, others have a heavy accent, and others just place emphasis wherever they feel like it. Some kinds of music* work well for giving you an ear for the changes that matter (And even with all the changes, natives still are able to understand most music, so it is a skill to learn).

* I love me some guturals in my music, but it's probably not the best way to train your ear for every day conversation
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-22 16:53:44+00:00
> Riyadh (along with the rest of the Gulf) and New Delhi are quietly lobbying against some sort of American action

Nobody wants missiles flying over their homelands. At the same time, both goverments have been supportive of America's non-proliferation work in Iran.

My broad point is there are plenty of folks who may be open to covertly supporting the protesters beyond America blowing blowing god knows what up.
by Zetaphor | 2026-02-22 16:54:27+00:00
Are you basing that on your informed first hand experience, or based on your assumptions backed by no actual experience using the hardware?

I don't know what you want me to tell you, you're welcome to believe whatever you want but that doesn't change the reality I experience actually using the thing.

Benchmark numbers and first hand reviews are readily available if you bothered to look.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-22 16:55:40+00:00
> it's really hard from the perspective of being in a western country to work out how much of the protests are genuinely endogenous to Iran and how much is an intelligence operation, because it's clearly not 0%

Intelligence assets are generally covert. It's incredibly difficult to engineer a protest–particularly in a repressive regime–out of nothing. Like half of the CIA's history in the Cold War was trying and failing to do this.
by injidup | 2026-02-22 16:55:46+00:00
> the only viable solution becomes giving the movement its demands.

This interpretation reeks of Western naivete. Students were not merely arrested — they were gunned down en masse in the streets and even in hospitals. They were provoked by the U.S. president, who promised support to take on the institutions, but that support never materialized. The likely endgame of this current gunboat diplomacy is similar to Venezuela: the U.S. secures resource access while leaving the existing system intact, and the student protesters are hunted down. In other words, nothing changes for the people demanding reform.
by appreciatorBus | 2026-02-22 16:55:50+00:00
> So the mods at HN allow us too read about other countries protests, but not in the U.S.? I guess if all those illegal immigrants had oil, it'd be okay?

> Despite how dark and sinister you've made everything sound, you've mostly just rephrased what I wrote, with a lot of pejoratives. In that sense, you're right—there isn't much disagreement here. You just think we're wrong and bad to run HN the way we do, and that's fine.

There’s nothing wrong with someone not liking how HN is run. It’s just weird to complain about it, on HN no less, when there so many other sites already run by people who share your politics, sites where you would feel welcome and you wouldn’t have to invent scary stories about the ulterior motives of moderators.

HN’s attempt to focus makes it special, unique and valuable. Turning it into a general political free for fall like every other site would destroy that.
by Loxicon | 2026-02-22 16:58:30+00:00
Reading the comments the author is basically "one with ai" where his life is deeply integrated with ai agents.

I have a friend exactly like that. And he has being doing it so long that he cannot even respond to a discord without asking AI "what do you think? what should I say? what do you think they mean?"

Full NPC mode, and it's really sad and scary.

You lose the ability to think. You lose all differentiation.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-22 16:59:42+00:00
> why don't we apply the same reasoning to the other authoritarian theocracies in the region that are just as oppressive?

They're either our allies, aren't pursuing nuclear weapons and/or aren't actively destabilising everything in their vicinity.

America calling for regime change in the Middle East is fraught, and I'm honestly not yet on board with direct action (though that's about as influential as what shade the moon is tonight). But Iran is "uniquely bad." It's also uniquely imperialistic in the region, up there with to Israel.
by ryandrake | 2026-02-22 16:59:44+00:00
I'm currently having Claude help me reverse engineer the wire protocol of a moderately expensive hardware device, where I have very little data about how it works. You better believe "we" do it by the book. Large, detailed plan md file laying out exactly what it will do, what it will try, what it will not try, guardrails, and so on. And a "knowledge base" md file that documents everything discovered about how the device works. Facts only. The knowledge base md file is 10x the size of the code at this point, and when I ask it to try something, I ask Claude to prove to me that our past findings support the plan.

Claude is like an intern coder-bro, eager to start crushin' it. But, you definitely can bring Claude "down to earth," have it follow actual engineering best practices, and ask it to prove to you that each step is the correct one. It requires careful, documented guardrails, and on top of it, I occasionally prompt it to show me with evidence how the previous N actions conformed to the written plan and didn't deviate.
by Swaggermuffin64 | 2026-02-22 16:59:45+00:00
VimGym: Open Source Multiplayer VIM Racing

I built VimGym, an open source multiplayer browser game where you practice Vim motions by racing other players.

Why This Exists:

When I was learning Vim, I noticed a huge shortage of free online learning tools. When I was learning to type generally, typeracer.com helped me not just type fast, but learn proper technique and hand positioning. I wanted to create something similar for Vim, to learn motions correctly, but also to build speed through competition. Vim is SO satisfying when you’re quick at it, and I think early exposure to this aspect could really encourage adoption. Also VimGym offers something fun for experienced VIM users: an opportunity to flex on people.

Current Status:
I've just released the first beta version, it has quick play, private match and practice modes. The tasks within these help practice the basic vim motions, but I plan to make the tasks more comprehensive. Currently, we measure success by time, but I want to incorporate the efficiency of keystroke into a player's final score. Additionally, I’d love to have a ranked mode / leaderboards, and community tournaments, but that’s for when a community actually exists lol.

Feedback:
Any and all feedback is appreciated! But specifically I’m interested in:
What ways could we raise the skill ceiling for very knowledgeable players?
How could we combine speed in time, and keystroke efficiency into a final score?
When something breaks (it’s honestly pretty likely)
Is it fun? What would make it more fun?
Github link: https://github.com/Swaggermuffin64/vim-racing/tree/main
Also, I made a discord server: https://discord.gg/wUCdGVGeuM
Show HN: FounderSDR – AI cold email outreach for B2B SaaS founders ($299/mo)
by AISDR | 2026-02-22 17:00:20+00:00
As a B2B SaaS founder myself, I know the grind of early-stage sales. You're building the product, handling support, and somehow need to fill the pipeline with leads. Hiring a full-time SDR costs at least $40K/year plus tools and training, which is out of reach for most pre-Series A teams. Cold emailing works, but doing it manually at scale—researching prospects, personalizing messages, following up—is a massive time sink.

That's why I built FounderSDR: an AI-powered service that automates the whole process. We send over 1,000 tailored cold emails per month, pulling in prospect data from LinkedIn and company sites to make each one feel human-written. Pricing starts at $299/month.

I'd love feedback from the HN crowd: Have you tried AI for sales outreach? What pain points am I missing?
by bubblewand | 2026-02-22 17:01:10+00:00
Indeed, that Docker is functionally a cross-distro rolling release package manager, configuration standard, and service supervisor[1] is the appeal to me. Any isolation it achieves is necessary for that to all work reliably, but is not why I use it.

Inability to find a service I want to run on Gitbub and 95+% of the time to be able to configure it and have it running and fully managed with usually just a one-liner shell script like 10 minutes later just by finding an existing docker image is the thing I’d lose with jails. That’s all of the value of docker to me personally. Jails could be a building block toward that, but last I checked there’s no deep and up-to-date library of “packages” I can reach for, using jails, which makes it pretty much useless to me.

1: I have like eight or nine services running on my home Debian system, they all auto-restart and come back up on reboot, and I’ve not had to touch Systemd once on that machine.
by tptacek | 2026-02-22 17:02:28+00:00
Even if the XOR of the plaintexts doesn’t help an attacker, it still makes the encryption very brittle [...]

This paragraph is a little weird. Encryption at the point where a nonce has been reused isn't so much brittle as it is broken. You've got P1 XOR P2, neither of which are uniform random keystreams. It's highly structured. You don't need a P1 or P2 leak to begin attacking it.

I'm sure the libraries are quite bad, but I'd also say that there's nothing wrong with not supporting GCM or (heh) GCM-SIV. Very few libraries do provide a GCM-SIV. I don't love GCM, and CTR+HMAC is a perfectly cromulent composed AE system.
by pino83 | 2026-02-22 17:03:00+00:00
Some things were always wrong. Since day 1. And since day 1 there were people (e.g. me) who constantly told the others. But got ignored.

No, enshittification is not new. It was obvious from day 1 that it will eventually happen. To everybody who know basic mechanisms of how human beings interact with each other.

Sometimes people come to me and say "yeah, well, it's about technology, that's not my business, and I don't really care". This is stupid in various regards. At first, the same people shifted their entire life into that 'technology', and were constantly crying how everything is going to be digital in the future. Beyond that, the entire topic is not at all about tech. It's about how human beings interact. About markets, and all kinds of non-tech things.

"enshittification on modern computers is still relatively new" is like a chain smoker saying something like "lung cancer is still relatively new". Sure, in some way it might actually be new. But is it a good excuse for anything? No. That danger was crystal clear since the first cigarette. Right? Everything else is lame excuses and stupid babble.
by indemnity | 2026-02-22 17:03:05+00:00
This is an insanely privileged post.

“Advice for my fellow Ivy/top 10 grads”, is more accurate.

Mate, no matter what you do, you will have at a minimum an upper middle class life and a good chance of moving in circles where opportunities frequently present themselves.

This isn’t envy, everyone has the cards they are dealt. But damn, I can’t relate to anything in this post, it reads like instructions to min/max your already great situation!
by jolmg | 2026-02-22 17:03:14+00:00
>> Equivalent but just as unsafe.

> To my understanding, the main difference between "curl directly to bash" and "curl to a temp file, then execute the temp file"...

It's not a temp file in the sense of a regular file. `<()` is also a pipe, hence equivalent. `curl` and `bash` run concurrently.

Running one after the other wouldn't be all that much of an improvement anyway if it's done automatically. One really should manually review the script before running it.
by neogodless | 2026-02-22 17:03:22+00:00
> I stumbled upon Mastodon and it reminded me of the early days of Twitter. Back in 2006, I followed a small number of folks of the nerd variety on Twitter and received genuinely interesting updates from them.

Personally, I never got into Twitter. I'm on the Fediverse now, and check in on it occasionally, but it never draws me in. I don't connect with people on that kind of platform.

Some forums work for me, mostly because there's a small enough number of participants, or, importantly, there's a place I can go to read content from specific people. Even if we don't become friends (or IRL friends), I still feel like I know them to some degree. The people matter.

Twitter / Fediverse / Bluesky seem to be about topics, and as such, I lose interest quickly. Because no matter how much I like photography, birding, cars, board games, computers, software, etc... I don't really care what the masses have to say on those topics. I want to know about Alice, Bob, and Carol have to say on things that interest me.

Early Facebook was, as described in the article, people you knew, who held some sway in your life, sharing their life events (however inane), or their opinions. I care more about that than I care about a celebrity or complete stranger declaring some thing as good or bad or interesting.

But the network effect was always going to matter. LiveJournal/Xanga/MySpace all had some network effect where some of your friends were there, and you wanted to be there, too. But Facebook figured out monetization, and they still seem to hold the greatest network effect despite how terrible the experience has become. I can post photos there, and dozens will respond, all people I know. If I post in literally any other place, I will get less than dozens of responses, and almost none of them will be from people I know.

There is no new place like early Facebook, or even current Facebook. But of course what I want is a place where I can share with the people I know, and no one has to pay for it, but the monetization doesn't drive the service towards enshittification. This isn't a very realistic desire. Discord has been the closest for me, where I have dozens of contacts in a shared space, and very frequently get interaction with people I know about things I care about. But it also feels like enshittification of Discord is also inevitable even though there's a paid subscription option.
by hunterpayne | 2026-02-22 17:03:59+00:00
You only think that because your political partisanship overwhelms your geopolitical knowledge. But sure, a country that is the primary funder of terrorism in the ME is doing nothing wrong.

They didn't, for instance, mess up the building of water infrastructure which is causing the taps to run dry in their capitol. Oh wait, they did. But since that has nothing to do with sanctions, you didn't hear about it because it doesn't fit a specific political narrative.

Also, apparently everyone in the world has the right to trade with the west, even if they are doing everything in their power to destroy the west.

PS Iran funds the Russian war in Ukraine.
by corndoge | 2026-02-22 17:04:01+00:00
It is being discussed as though it were ontologically novel, karpathy is saying it's something new and he is an authority, so to me there is something here that i am not seeing. I promise i am not trying to be a naysayer or poke holes, I am literally just trying to find out what the hell it is. I would install it but i don't want to install something without knowing what it does, and what is written in the docs is clear as mud.
by zer00eyz | 2026-02-22 17:04:49+00:00
The thing is, that declining birth rates in the west are more about economic and social factors than they are about any environmental concerns.

Birth control, postponing having a first child, economic factors all far outweigh any environmental issue.

Go back 100 years, 25 percent of the us population was farming. Kids weren't a burden they were free labor. Now children represent a massive cost to parents, that does not provide any benefit. Furthermore having kids today, in the west, is, to be blunt, odious. People dont want to have 2.2 children so we can even maintain replacement levels.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-22 17:05:00+00:00
> interpretation reeks of Western naivete

The author is "an ancient and military historian who currently teaches as a Teaching Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University" [1].

> Students were not merely arrested — they were gunned down en masse in the streets and even in hospitals

Non-violent doesn't mean peaceful.

People died in our Civil Rights protests. People died in the Indian independence and the Phillipines' People Power Revolution. Each of their leaders were gunned down, and the last won in an autocracy. (Even if you only read the blurb, the state's violent overreaction is part of the parcel.)

> They were provoked by the U.S.

Lots of Americans think the world revolves around us. The truth is we have less influence than we think. We didn't provoke these protests, though we did give them false hope.

> the U.S. secures resource access while leaving the existing system intact, and the student protesters are hunted down

Which opposition figure is being hunted down in Venezuela under Rodriguez?

[1] https://acoup.blog/about-the-pedant/
by cardanome | 2026-02-22 17:05:10+00:00
You know Venezuela, Iran, Kuba. I wonder what all these countries that western Media tells us have "oppressive regimes" have in common.

Funny how they all have spoken out against the genocide in Gaza. One would think that would be the link on why they are targeted. Maybe the problem is not humanitarian but that they are opposing US imperialism?

Just like all the times before. You know when Iraq was preparing weapons of mass destruction. When Libya needed to be bombed for the good of its people so that Islamist warmongers could destroy the country. When the US brought the Taliban into power to fight the Soviets and then invaded Afghanistan to get rid of the Taliban again. And then left and now the Taliban are fine again.

War. War never changes. It is the same old lies.

Now they want to destroy Iran.
by libraryofbabel | 2026-02-22 17:05:14+00:00
I actually like this article a lot. I do a bit of teaching, and I imagined the ideal audience for this as a smart junior engineer who knows SQL and has encountered transactions but maybe doesn’t really understand them yet. I think introducing things via examples of isolation anomalies (which most engineers will have seen examples of in bugs, even if they didn’t fully understand them) gives the explanation a lot more concreteness than starting with serializability as a theoretical concept as GP is proposing. Sure, strict serializability is a powerful idea that ties all this together and is more satisfying for an expert who already knows this stuff. But for someone who is just learning, you have to motivate it first.

If anything, I’d say it might be better to start with the lower isolation levels first, highlight the concurrency problems that can arise with them, and gradually introduce higher isolation levels until you get to serializability. That feels a bit more intuitive rather than downward progression from serializability to read uncommitted as presented here.

It also might be nice to see a quick discussion of why people choose particular isolation levels in practice, e.g. why you might make a tradeoff under high concurrency and give up serializability to avoid waits and deadlocks.

But excellent article overall, and great visualizations.
by Aerroon | 2026-02-22 17:07:09+00:00
>"[...] But we should claim the right to suppress them [intolerant ideologies] if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols."

The paradox of tolerance is not about censoring others. If anything, censorship lands on the side of the intolerant of this paradox.