MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rq1 | 2026-02-24 10:20:17+00:00
> I would say modern c++ written by someone already familiar with rust will probably be structured in a way that's extremely easy to port because you end up modeling the borrow checker in your brain.

I can't stress out how much important this sentence is. I would even remove the "familiar with rust" part.

Anyone who still thinks it's good to use C/CPP on modern hardware where Rust support is available and good: please print the sentence above and post it all over your place.
by garryclarke1 | 2026-02-24 10:23:10+00:00
British bedrooms present specific spatial challenges that European furniture dimensions do not always accommodate. Bedroom furniture sets from DHS are designed around the standard alcove widths and ceiling heights found in Victorian terraces, post-war semis, and modern new-build properties across the UK. This means that a three-piece set comprising a wardrobe, chest of drawers, and bedside unit can be positioned without requiring structural modification or bespoke carpentry.
by Aeglaecia | 2026-02-24 10:23:30+00:00
thats definitely the way i feel using the net now. but expressing it that way can be kinda rude, coz some people naturally write like the sam altman machine. i tried pointing out repeated use of ai grammar techniques, that seemed to me to be the middle ground between wasting my time and being a dick to others. but pointing out ai grammar techniques got me flagged here. anyone got a better middle ground?
by dgxyz | 2026-02-24 10:24:08+00:00
I appreciated that smoke comes out of the battery if you short it :)

Edit: I am ex EE. I will note that it's horrible using this view. It is marginally more horrible than using breadboards in reality. Schematics exist because reality tends to suck or have inconsistencies. For example TO-99 packages come in different pin orders, so 2N3904 has the opposite order to a BC547. Also breadboards tend not to have full length bus bars depending on vendors. At least though in this form it's an ideal representation though which doesn't have parasitic capacitors, inductors, dodgy contacts and no ground plane all over it.

It is good fun though :)
by surferbayarea | 2026-02-24 10:24:30+00:00
Forge brings rigorous, adversarial architectural planning and reliable step-by-step execution to AI-assisted development. It works with Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor, or directly via API — the provider is pluggable.

How It Works

Planning — Two independent AI architects design competing solutions. Adversarial critics tear each design apart. Refiners address the critiques. A judge synthesizes the best elements into a final plan. The result: plans that have been stress-tested before a single line of code is written.

Execution — A deterministic pipeline runs your plan through configurable steps (code, build, lint, test, review, PR) with evidence-based validation at each stage. State lives on disk, not in LLM memory — every step gets a fresh agent with zero context rot.
by reppap | 2026-02-24 10:24:53+00:00
The assertion that an uncensored internet is a better world should probably require some motivation.

If everyone was a normal (as far as anyone is normal) law abiding citizen perhaps I would agree, but sadly that is far from the case. I think history has quite clearly shown that there is a minority of people out there that will take advantage and ruin things for everyone else. It's the same reason we have militaries, police forces, government checks and balances, etc. The internet is no exception to this.

I don't think the world is simple enough where anyone could be absolutist about freedom, it's all grey areas and complicated lines drawn.
Show HN: SsrJSON: faster than the fastest Python JSON library
by antares0982 | 2026-02-24 10:25:18+00:00
I developed a Python JSON library, ssrJSON, built on the yyjson codebase and SIMD techniques. It can serve as a compatible replacement for most common JSON use cases, and benchmarks show it outperforms orjson, which advertises itself as the fastest. Compared with other Python JSON libraries, ssrJSON addresses UTF-8 cache related performance pitfalls, giving it a significant advantage when handling strings; technical details are available on my blog: https://en.chr.fan/2026/01/07/python-json/. In addition, for floating‑point handling ssrJSON uses the latest zmij algorithm.

I noticed that orjson has closed its issue tracker: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47022606. If the community wishes to maintain a stable, high‑performance JSON parser, ssrJSON could be considered as an alternative.
by gregoryli360 | 2026-02-24 10:27:29+00:00
The biggest gap to bridge between browser automation and agentic AIs is the web-client interface. Perplexity’s Comet attempted to do this, but their app quickly became a ram-hogging, flaming pile of garbage. Then, we had OpenClaw, which promised so much, but usually ended up gobbling tokens and making little progress. So, I thought of a lightweight alternative – why not combine the strengths of browser automation (Selenium) with agentic coding AIs (Claude Code)?

I came to this idea first when I had to scrape Amazon listings dynamically for a project. With Amazon’s notoriously aggressive enforcement of anti-bot and anti-scraping policies, I knew I had to get creative with automating this. So, I came to the realization that each page could be dynamically navigated to and loaded with Selenium and then be saved to a static `.html` file. Then, Claude could simultaneously read these files and update its actions based on the contents.

A few days later, I had a new project where I had to review applications from an admin portal. This was when the core idea struck me like déjà vu. I refined the system to use my default browser portfolio, automatically including saved cookies and session data. Then I designed a simple command system for the AI to interact with the browser. The result was a bare-bones yet fully functional system that took the best of both AI coding agents and browser automation tools.

If you would like to check out the project, the GitHub repo is https://github.com/GregoryLi360/Agentic-Browser-Automation/. The main `browse.py` file is a mere ~250 lines of code. Any feedback is appreciated!
by locknitpicker | 2026-02-24 10:28:05+00:00
> What tremendously helps is asking the LLM to add a lot a lot explanations by adding comments to each and every line or function.

No, it doesn't. It's completely useless and unhelpful. These machine-generated comments are only realizations of the context that already outputted crap. Dumping volumes of this output adds more work to reviewers to parse through to figure out the mess presented by vibecoders who didn't even bothered to check what they are generating.
by miki123211 | 2026-02-24 10:28:16+00:00
I think there's a tradeoff triangle here, not dissimilar to Zooko's triangle or the CAP theorem, where the three aspects are age verification, privacy, and the freedom to run custom software on devices of your choosing.

You can have no system at all, which gives you freedom and privacy, but not age verification. You can have ID uploads, which give you age verification and freedom, but not privacy. You can have a ZKP-based system, which gives you age verification and privacy, but not freedom. This is because you need a way to prevent one unscrupulous ID owner from issuing millions of valid assertions for any interested user.
by jshmrsn | 2026-02-24 10:29:00+00:00
That has not been established in the courts, at least not precisely enough to assert that for sure this project isn’t copyrightable.

“ But the decision does raise the question of how much human input is necessary to qualify the user of an AI system as the “author” of a generated work. While that question was not before the court, the court’s dicta suggests that some amount of human input into a generative AI tool could render the relevant human an author of the resulting output.”

“Thaler did not address how much human authorship is necessary to make a work generated using AI tools copyrightable. The impact of this unaddressed issue is worth underscoring.”

https://www.mofo.com/resources/insights/230829-district-cour...
by noduerme | 2026-02-24 10:29:17+00:00
A lot of people have enough of a sense of responsibility to donate blood, or donate their organs.

I've long had the suspicion that much of what is called Alzheimers or dementia is some form of prion disease. This study doesn't show that, exactly, but it shows that abnormal proteins may be directly correlated.

So - and I'm not saying this is the case - but suppose that the abnormal proteins identified in this study could be transmitted by blood transfusions or organ transplants. Wouldn't that itself be enough for your diagnosis to help you personally not transmit those proteins to someone else?

If your attitude is that no one else in the world matters once you get a bad diagnosis, then nothing really mattered to you before. Other people are working day and night trying to cure you, so there's no cause for that level of nihilism. You may as well try to help from the vantage point you have.
by BoppreH | 2026-02-24 10:29:28+00:00
> Here's what I mean by "good code": [...]

What a fantastic list. I'll be saving it to show the junior developers.

My only nitpick is that "reliability" should have been a point by itself. All the other "ilities" can be appropriately sacrificed in some context, but I've never seen unreliable software being praised for its code quality.

Which is part of why LLMs are so frustrating. They're extremely useful and extremely unreliable.
by drysine | 2026-02-24 10:29:49+00:00
Yeah, Fermi was such an unmotivated slacker.

Relayed by Nick Metropolis: Fermi and von Neumann overlapped. They collaborated on problems of Taylor instabilities and they wrote a report. When Fermi went back to Chicago after that work he called in his very close collaborator, namely Herbert Anderson, a young Ph.D. student at Columbia, a collaboration that began from Fermi's very first days at Columbia and lasted up until the very last moment. Herb was an experimental physicist. (If you want to know about Fermi in great detail, you would do well to interview Herbert Anderson.) But, at any rate, when Fermi got back he called in Herb Anderson to his office and he said, "You know, Herb, how much faster I am in thinking than you are. That is how much faster von Neumann is compared to me." [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39965802
by adius | 2026-02-24 10:29:59+00:00
Yes, we agree that a lot of the value comes from the huge standard library. That's why we try to implement as much of it as possible. Right now we support more than 900 functions. All the Data functions will be a little more complicated of course, but they could e.g make a request to online data archives (ourworldindata.org, wikidata.org, …). So I think it's definitely doable.

We also want to provide an option for users to add their own functions to the standard library. So if they e.g. need `FinancialData[]` they could implement it themselves and provide it as a standard library function.
by dspillett | 2026-02-24 10:30:04+00:00
> which I suppose makes sense if 30% of people simply lack the ability to reason

I think it would be better to say that 30% of people either lack the ability to reason (inarguably true in a few cases, though I'd suggest, and hope, an order of magnitude or two less than 30%, as that would be a life-altering mental impairment) or just can't generally be bothered to, or just didn't (because they couldn't be bothered, or because they felt some social pressure to answer quickly rather than taking more than an instant time to think) at the time of being asked this particular question.

An automated system like an LLM to not have this problem. It has no path to turn off or bypass any function that it has, so if it could reason it would.
by salty_frog | 2026-02-24 10:30:08+00:00
The focus is on downstream, but is upstream ready for this speed up?

The linked blog post draws comparisons to the industrial revolution however in the industrial revolution the speed up caused innovation upstream not downstream.

The first innovation was mechanical weaving. The bottleneck was then yarn. This was automated so the bottleneck became cotton production, which was then mechanised.

So perhaps the real bottleneck of being able to write code faster is upstream.

Can requirements of what to build keep up with pace to deliver it?
by chickensong | 2026-02-24 10:30:56+00:00
> NOBODY locks their laptop when they leave it

Back in the day at LAN parties, if you did that you might come back to find your mouse buttons had been reversed, your desktop icons had been cleared and replaced with a screenshot of your desktop icons as wallpaper, or worse. We called it "leaving the keys in the ignition". Simpler times back then, but a great kick-start to opsec.
by PranayKumarJain | 2026-02-24 10:31:12+00:00
Nice—this is a very pragmatic “works with just TwiML” approach.

A couple questions / thoughts from building voice agents in production:

- How do you handle barge‑in / interruptions? With <Gather input="speech"> + polling, it’s hard to do true full‑duplex + partial ASR. Have you considered a hybrid mode where you keep the TwiML simplicity for setup, but optionally switch to <Stream> (Media Streams) when people want sub‑second turn-taking?
- Twilio’s built-in speech recog is convenient, but in my experience it can be the first thing teams outgrow (accuracy, language coverage, costs, and lack of token-level partials). Do you expose an interface so people can swap STT later without reworking the call control?
- For long agent responses: do you chunk <Say> / keep call alive with <Pause>? Any gotchas around Twilio timeouts while the agent is “thinking”?

We’ve run into the same infra-vs-latency tradeoff at eboo.ai (real-time voice agents / telephony + WebRTC). If you ever want a sanity check on the lowest-latency Twilio path (Media Streams + incremental STT + barge-in), happy to compare notes.
by nicbou | 2026-02-24 10:31:13+00:00
Immigrants do not have an ID for up to a few years when they move to Germany. Just this week the Berlin immigration office stopped issuing plastic residence cards for budget reasons, so people get a sticker in their passport.

Passport recognition is also spotty. The ID verification providers used by banks do not recognise Indian passports.

Will we exclude a few million people because it’s too expensive to verify that they are over 18?

Add this to “falsehoods programmers believe about ID verification”.
by belocci | 2026-02-24 10:31:55+00:00
AI consultancies shipping LLMs internally lack proper validation, regression testing, and release control. Most rely on scripts and manual checks, making deployments risky and hard to reproduce.

Uni Trainer is a local-first validation and deployment platform for internal LLM teams. It benchmarks models, detects regressions, enforces release gates, and tracks performance - all on-prem.

Built for teams that need reliability, auditability, and control beyond prompt engineering and APIs.
by MadxX79 | 2026-02-24 10:32:21+00:00
Absolutely, the belief in scientific circles is that the way forward to develop cures (or at least treatment that slows down the progression) is to treat it early. When you get to the point where you start showing clear symptoms, your brain is already mush. If you have a potential treatment that attacks the root cause, you would have to catch the very early, pre-clinical, stages of the disease, but without good diagnostics there is no way to do that (short of giving the disease to a wide swath of the population, like a vaccine... but that gets expensive very quickly, and side effects become a bigger worry.
by oulipo2 | 2026-02-24 10:34:03+00:00
First there's no "code". There are many different variations. Doing basic UI in React is way different from doing low-level embedded code with locking and mutexes, etc.

AI is quite good at what I call "code in-painting": you give the outlines, and it fills the boring stuff (writing out UI, writing out the test content, etc)

It's still VERY bad at maths. For technical reasons (you can't differentiate a SAT solver, so for now LLMs are mostly "hallucinating" plausible-sounding reasonings, but not doing any "solid math") And when you start reasoning about locks / mutexes, etc, what you're really doing is (some primitive form of) maths and logic.

For now, there's no easy-to-use framework (eg a streamlined way to encode the constraints in Lean / Coq etc) or AI capacities that allow to bridge something like this to make it safe for very "math-like" code. And it's easy to shoot yourself in the foot.
by n4r9 | 2026-02-24 10:35:13+00:00
I fonud the following Wikipedia section somewhat useful for understanding the context here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect#Implications...

Annoyingly, very few of the citations are accessible. But the gist as I understand it is that this challenges various proposed explanations for the Bouba-Kiki effect, for example that it relates to human physiology or has a human-specific neurological basis.
by MillionOClock | 2026-02-24 10:35:39+00:00
It feel a bit like this to me. That's not to say LLMs should not have detected this, but I still feel like this fits the "vibes" the question gives, and some LLMs fall into that trap. Is it actually what's happening in the neural nets? Maybe not! But I always find it interesting or at least entertaining to approach those questions that way nonetheless; especially given the pattern matching nature of LLMs.
by miki123211 | 2026-02-24 10:35:43+00:00
There's not enough people to care.

They have the propaganda advantage (think of the children, those who undermine the system are pedophiles by definition). They have the law (just reclassify such activity as aiding and abetting the distribution of child pornography). They have the scare tactics (nobody wants 30 years in prison and an entry on the sexual offender's register).

This war will be won with words and at most a few arrests, just to make an example, just like the war on terror and anonymous financial activity.

Privacy just doesn't matter for 99+% of the population as much as we think, which is very much unlike piracy or drugs for example. If this wasn't the case, we'd all be using Signal and Monero right now.
by kittikitti | 2026-02-24 10:36:16+00:00
At this point, the industry wide decision to have AI as opt-out is suspicious. Why not have an AI opt-in default? It would certainly save so much trouble from the Luddites. On the other hand, an AI opt-in default would be not using any technology at all (where opting in would be turning on your computer or device) under a dictionary definition of artificial intelligence.
by DrScientist | 2026-02-24 10:37:01+00:00
I think some of those barriers are going away ( in the UK it's now possible to get symmetric full fibre at a reasonable price ), static IPs, ISP's without filtering etc.

I think the main barrier is still the complexity of running your own service - it's a full time job to keep on top of the bad actors.

For example, if you have your own domain it's perfectly possible to run your own email server - however it's quite a lot of ongoing effort - it's not just set up and forget.
by lynndotpy | 2026-02-24 10:37:35+00:00
"AI" is a term which means a dozen things and has changed a dozen times. It's about as meaningful a signifier as "smart".

If I were to draw a line, I'd say AI is anything with a transformer model powering it.

As exhausted by 'AI' as I am, translation is one of the things neural networks (and especially transformers) have been constantly improving SOTA on.
by neosat | 2026-02-24 10:38:06+00:00
I don't think Walter is implying anything about how common or uncommon this is. His core insight seems fairly objective and plausible to me: "...your chances for happiness are increased if you wind up doing something that is a reflection of what you loved most when you were somewhere between nine and eleven years old". I.e. if you do end up being lucky and wise to do something as a profession closely related to what you *loved* doing when you were ~11 , because you end up spending time doing what you love (and equally importantly not spend that time doing something that sucks up energy) you increase your chances of being happier.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-24 10:38:08+00:00
The other poster had said nothing about microcontrollers, e.g. about the various MCU models based on Cortex-M cores.

Some things are best done with a microcontroller, and those are not suitable for being done with a general-purpose CPU either based on Intel/AMD or on Cortex-A cores. Actually there are many projects that mistakenly use something like a Raspberry Pi instead of a better and cheaper implementation with a microcontroller, e.g. one based on Cortex-M7 or its successor, Cortex-M85.

The other poster said that where you do not want a microcontroller, but you want to run a standard operating system, e.g. Linux, then the best choice is much more frequently a SBC with an Intel Alder Lake N or Twin Lake CPU, as these not only have a better performance per dollar than the ARM-based SBCs, but they also avoid any software problems and future maintainability problems.

Unfortunately, during the last few months the price of Intel-based SBCs has been affected by the fact that most of them do not have soldered memory but they use one SODIMM memory module. While you can buy an Intel Alder Lake N based SBC for $100, buying today a SODIMM for it may cost as much or more, depending on the amount of memory with which you are content.

The ARM SBCs that come with soldered LPDDR memory have initially been less affected by the price hikes, though now even for them the prices are rising.
by KronisLV | 2026-02-24 10:38:49+00:00
The comments explain the nuance there pretty well:

> This study had 16 participants, with a mix of previous exposure to AI tools - 56% of them had never used Cursor before, and the study was mainly about Cursor.

> My intuition here is that this study mainly demonstrated that the learning curve on AI-assisted development is high enough that asking developers to bake it into their existing workflows reduces their performance while they climb that learing curve.

Giving people a tool, that have no experience with it, and expecting them to be productive feels... odd?
Show HN: Dypai – Build backends from your IDE using AI and MCP
by lorengarcialv | 2026-02-24 10:39:40+00:00
Hey HN,

I built DYPAI a backend platform where you describe what you
need to your AI assistant (via MCP) and it builds the entire
backend for you.

Instead of writing API routes or edge functions, your backend
is a composition of nodes: database queries, Stripe payments,
emails, Slack, WhatsApp, AI agents, logic – all connected as
flows and exposed as production API endpoints.

One prompt, one endpoint: validate input → check permissions →
query DB → transform data → send email → notify Slack → respond.
No code. No deploy. Just works.

You can build from Cursor/Claude via MCP, see everything on a
visual canvas, or use the REST API and TypeScript SDK directly.

It's in public beta so rough edges are expected – that's exactly
why I'm sharing it here.

Demo video: https://www.dypai.ai/

Looking for feedback. Happy to answer anything.
by rerdavies | 2026-02-24 10:40:18+00:00
This is something I have wondered about before: whether AIs are more likely to give wrong answers when you ask a stupid question instead of a sensible one. Speaking personally, I often cannot resist the temptation to give reductio-ad-absurdum answers to particularly ridiculous questions.

If 30% of humans on the internet can't be bothered to make an effort to answer stupid questions correctly, then one would expect AIs to replicate this behaviour. And if humans on the internet sometimes provide sarcastic answers when presented with ridiculous questions, one would expect AIs to replicate this behavior as well.

So you really cannot say they have no incentive to do so. The incentive they have is that they get rewarded for replicating human behaviour.