MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by joshgpurvis | 2026-02-19 15:57:40+00:00
I got tired of repeating myself to every AI tool I use. My dietary restrictions, my tech stack, my family's names — every new agent starts from zero. So I built an open source personal database that any AI agent can read from and write to via MCP – Epitome.

It's five layers on top of Postgres: structured tables, a portable identity profile, semantic vector search (pgvector), a knowledge graph that auto-extracts entities and relationships, and a confidence-scored memory quality system that lets memories decay or get reinforced over time. Each user gets their own Postgres schema — not RLS, actual schema isolation.

Agents connect over Streamable HTTP with OAuth and granular consent controls. You decide which agent sees what. Append-only audit log for everything.

MIT licensed, self-hostable with docker compose up, or use the hosted version. Built with Hono, React, D3.js for graph viz.

GitHub: https://github.com/gunning4it/epitome

Would love feedback on the architecture and what's missing. Happy to go deep on any of the technical decisions or feel free to contribute.
by innocent_bh | 2026-02-19 15:57:52+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m building BraveHuman, an AI-based roleplay app designed to help people practice complex, real-world conversations.

Right now, the core experience revolves around what I call “stories” — structured, multi-step roleplays where each scenario connects to the next.

Instead of a single isolated prompt like “practice an interview,” users move through a narrative thread. For example:

– You’re having a casual coffee chat with a colleague
– Later you’re invited to a pub hangout
– On the way, your boss calls about an urgent client issue

The goal is to simulate the unpredictability and context-switching of real conversations, rather than a single static Q&A exchange.

Each step involves interacting with an AI character and receiving feedback before moving forward.

I’m currently exploring two directions:

1. A more structured training architecture (e.g., breaking practice into explicit “training methods” instead of pure narrative flow)

2. A personalized scenario builder where users can generate custom practice environments (interviews, presentations, networking, etc.)

I’d really value feedback on a few things:

– Does narrative continuity meaningfully improve practice over isolated prompts?

– How would you approach measuring improvement in communication quality?

– If you were building this, would you double down on story-driven roleplay or move toward fully customizable scenarios?

Still early, but people are using it and iterating has been interesting.

Would appreciate critique on assumptions, architecture direction, or blind spots.
by thepasch | 2026-02-19 15:58:03+00:00
> pi with Claude is as good as (even better! given the obvious care to context management in pi) as Claude Code with Claude

And that’s out of the box. With how comically extensible pi is and how much control it gives you over every aspect of the pipeline, as soon as you start building extensions for your own, personal workflow, Claude Code legimitely feels like a trash app in comparison.

I don’t care what Anthropic does - I’ll keep using pi. If they think they need to ban me for that, then, oh well. I’ll just continue to keep using pi. Just no longer with Claude models.
by miguelaxcar | 2026-02-19 15:58:16+00:00
AI coding assistants are fast.

Sometimes faster than your understanding.

They jump to implementation before reading the codebase.
They assume things.
They produce confident drafts that look right.

Then you pay in rewrites.

If you are the person who gets pinged when something breaks, you know this pattern.

So I built a small open source protocol. It is not a plugin. Not a wrapper. Just structured instructions you drop into your repo.

The idea is simple, following RPI idea from Human Layer folks:

First, the assistant explores the codebase.
Then it surfaces assumptions and tradeoffs.
Only after explicit approval does it implement.

The goal is not to slow AI down.
The goal is to improve decision quality before code lands.

Speed without checkpoints is credit card speed.
You ship quickly. You pay later.

This protocol acts like an exoskeleton.
It amplifies discipline. It does not replace judgment.

I have been using it to reduce rewrites, clarify intent, and make AI assisted work more predictable.

Curious how others building daily with AI think about guardrails like this.

https://github.com/MiguelAxcar/ai-rpi-protocol
by PaulHoule | 2026-02-19 15:58:20+00:00
Dude, you're writing about the impacts of AI and you're either getting your article written by AI or you have talked so much to ChatGPT-5 that you're pick up its language patterns. I mean, two years ago you wouldn't have known how to type an em-dash (you probably still don't) and nobody talked like that. If you don't know that's a tell I question if you know enough about AI to have an opinion.

Now HN is under assault by people who are posting endless AI slop essays written by AI about the dangers of AI -- it's not as bad as you think it is, it's much worse, AI has stolen your voice!
Show HN: How far can you push file conversion into the browser?
by digitalofen | 2026-02-19 15:58:22+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been experimenting with how much file conversion can realistically be pushed into the browser.
Last year I tried compiling LibreOffice headless to WASM. The smallest build I could get was ~150MB — far too large just to convert a DOCX to PDF. That’s when I shifted to a hybrid approach.
Today ~90% of conversions run client-side using WASM (FFmpeg, PDF/image tooling, spreadsheets, etc.). The heavier edge cases fall back to a small server pipeline (LibreOffice, Pandoc, Poppler).

The main challenges weren’t the libraries themselves, but:
browser memory ceilings
handling large files without freezing the UI
lazy-loading ~30MB of WASM only when needed
Safari vs. Chromium behavior differences

FFmpeg.wasm runs at roughly 10–20% of native speed. Acceptable for small/medium files, less so for large media.
I also experimented with multithreaded FFmpeg in the browser, but haven’t found a stable setup yet.
Curious how others think about the tradeoff between client-side processing vs. fully server-side pipelines.

→ anythingconverter.com
by Otterly99 | 2026-02-19 15:58:24+00:00
Counter-argument: what if LLMs can help alleviate a doctor's work by providing quick diagnostic for simple cases?
How much time does a doctor spend writing prescriptions for cough-like symptoms?
How much time does an ophthalmologist spend measuring eye sight?
I totally agree that this is a bit of a radical opinion, and not everybody would be pleased with the idea of a program making diagnosis, so I am not fully advocating for it, but I think that we should not limit the potential of AI.
Also, to point out to France specifically. We need more teachers, yet new teachers are treated as commodities (you have to relocate to wherever the Education nationale tells you to go and in most cases, that means new teachers are relocated to difficult areas).
We need more doctors, yet the number of new doctors each year is fixed by the number of people that are allowed to pass the exam.
by gleipnircode | 2026-02-19 15:58:48+00:00
Good question. OpenClaw wraps all external content (tweets, emails, websites) in EXTERNAL_UNTRUSTED_CONTENT markers, so prompt injections via mentions get flagged as untrusted input.

ALMA also has wallet access but no one has tried yet. That's part of what makes the experiment interesting. Everything happens publicly on letairun.com, so if someone tries, everyone can watch what happens.
by yigitkonur35 | 2026-02-19 15:58:50+00:00
yeah, thanks for sharing your thoughts! the original idea was to reproduce the exact same session on other coding platforms using the jsonl schema of each, but after seeing how the microsoft ai engineers on copilot-cli handle session continuity (major respect to them), i switched to single-message compression and it's been working very well for me.

most of us are juggling between $20 chatgpt and $20 claude subscriptions, so being able to hop between them by copying stuff over properly is clutch. give it a shot and lmk what you think, or drop a pr if you’ve got tweaks!
by zpeti | 2026-02-19 15:58:58+00:00
> shed partisan tendencies and critically review policy initiatives

You could take a good will attitude to DOGE then. I think many (including Elon) genuinely believed they could cut fraud and waste. But by their own admission, they were only mostly an advisory committee.

You can only do so much. Congress still has authority, and that's how it works, that's how the system is intended. And the reason DOGE hasn't done much is exactly because congress isn't willing to cut spending. It NEVER will. It didn't under any president including Reagan.

So basically you have an ever increasing deficit and spending because the way the political system is setup drives this. In fact, it happens in basically every democracy, so maybe it's just something that happens in democracies.

So - you could call the promise of DOGE lies, but I think they were a lie from Trump and not Elon. I think Trump promised Elon cuts, to get his help in the election, then backtracked, and that's exactly why Elon stormed out, he didn't get what he wanted.

And the US government is still massively overspending. Trump didn't really cut anything.
Show HN: Crit – Visual QA for iOS apps and AI coding agents
by n8 | 2026-02-19 15:59:18+00:00
I built Crit, a CLI tool that lets you capture screenshots from iOS Simulator, drop pins on what's wrong, and hand structured feedback to any coding agent.

You just:

crit capture — screenshot your app screens
crit serve — review in browser, click to pin bugs and add comments
Tell your agent: "review .crit and fix each issue"

It saves annotated screenshots and JSON to a .crit/ folder. Works with Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini — anything that can read images. No plugins, no MCP, no dependencies.

macOS + Xcode required. Android not yet supported.
Repo: https://github.com/natethegreat/crit
by MarkusQ | 2026-02-19 16:00:32+00:00
This is really interesting, but it appears to hinge on an unstated (and unjustified) assumption: that scientists learn by back propagation, or something sufficiently similar that back propagation is a reasonable model.

It also:

* Bakes in the assumption that there are no internal mechanisms to be discovered ("Each environment is a mixture of multivariate Gaussian distributions")

* Ignores the possibility that their model of falsification is inadequate (they just test more near points with high error).

* Does a lot of "hopeful naming" which makes the results easy to misinterpret as saying more about like-named things in the real world than it actually does.
by jorblumesea | 2026-02-19 16:00:33+00:00
if by "culture" you mean rampant corporate propagandized media then yes. the US has historically been pretty close to europe over the last 100 years on many aspects. In the 70s there was legitimate debate about college being free. Now the debate is how much debt someone should take on. The overton window has shifted significantly since the 80s.
by midnitewarrior | 2026-02-19 16:00:40+00:00
I fed this to Claude, and it makes an interesting point in how the Poison Fountain is going to help concentrate AI into the hands of those who can filter out the poison, and out of the hands of those low-budget / open source efforts to build more equitable models that cannot afford to filter out the poison.

> But the strategy is incoherent in a way that bothers me. The framing is "machine intelligence is a threat to the human species, therefore poison the training data." But poisoned training data doesn't make AI disappear — it makes open and smaller models worse while barely denting organizations with the resources to detect and filter adversarial data. Google, Anthropic, OpenAI all have data quality pipelines specifically designed to catch this kind of thing. The people most hurt would be smaller open-source efforts and researchers with fewer resources. So the actual effect is likely to concentrate AI power further among the largest players — the exact opposite of what someone worried about existential risk from AI should want.
by dcre | 2026-02-19 16:00:43+00:00
Tokens per second are similar across Sonnet 4.5, Opus 4.5, and Opus 4.6. More importantly, normalizing for speed isn't enough anyway because smarter models can compensate for being slower by having to output fewer tokens to get the same result. The use of 99.9p duration is a considered choice on their part to get a holistic view across model, harness, task choice, user experience level, user trust, etc.
by Shocka1 | 2026-02-19 16:00:52+00:00
It's hard to swallow. I'm a 14 YOE software engineer working in an office of about 40 people, with five on the software team. We could cut our software team to 3 people and then maybe 2 after a couple years. The rest of the office could be skimmed to maybe 5 or 10 people. The engineers would babysit the systems and the other personnel would handle the face to face. With these systems developing in the OS the last year or so, it seems as though everything can be automated... Everyone has an X on their back, not just engineers.

Luckily my org has a bit of a pushback attitude towards AI systems, but it will only be a matter of time before we have to compete and adapt. It's kind of depressing, and only the strong will survive.
by speak_plainly | 2026-02-19 16:01:36+00:00
I use YouTube’s AI to screen podcasts, but I’ve noticed it has been glazing over large sections involving politically sensitive or outlandish topics. Although the AI could verify these details when pressed, its initial failure to include them constitutes a form of editorializing. While I understand the policy motivations behind this, such omissions are unacceptable in a tool intended for objective summarization.
by permo-w | 2026-02-19 16:02:11+00:00
Also redstone is different, there's no F3 menu, generally far less vanilla customisability, far more micro-transaction prompting, far fewer commands and I'm sure 20 other things that someone who has actually played Bedrock recently could name

This thread is quite weird to me. People are massively overstating how important modding is and understating the strength of vanilla Java. Minecraft is not Skyrim

Speedrunning, anarchy servers, parkour, technical farming, server economy destruction videos and other primarily vanilla Java content forms are as popular as ever or more. Alongside the newer content creators, Hermitcraft is still growing somehow, as is Etho. Besides anarchy a little bit, none of this is reliant on modding

There are significant updates every year and many people, including me, install them every time they come out and play them in vanilla.
by avian | 2026-02-19 16:02:19+00:00
Yes, built-in camera app. Maybe image processing is region dependent?

On several separate occasions in my life drawing group I tried to take pictures of the drawings and they always came out tinted - not full color, but enough to look pretty weird if you know the original is in black-and-white. I also do remember that the viewfinder has shown a square around the face on the paper on those occasions, as if I was photographing a live person.

I mean, sure maybe I'm doing something wrong. But the app has pretty much zero settings. I checked I was in normal photo, not the portrait mode and that Ultra HDR was turned off.

And it's definitely some kind of a image post-processing step. Because the live viewfinder shows what I would expect. Then I press the shutter and the save photo is obviously different.

I'm not making this up. First time I've seen this I searched the web and found many threads on reddit and such discussing similar issues on Pixel phones.

One from the top of my browser history:

https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/otsvv2/how_to_...
by lukaslalinsky | 2026-02-19 16:03:00+00:00
I've always been more interested in the computer science and software engineering aspects. I did enjoy writing code occasionally, but overall, I was wishing I had some kind of neural implant to convert my thoughts into code. Coding agents are now good enough that I consider that dream as realized, and with that benefit that I do not actually need any implant in my brain. :)
by HanClinto | 2026-02-19 16:03:42+00:00
Hey, I made the same decision (except I went with the 24gb model, not the 16gb). The other thing I like about having it on a separate Mac Mini is that it it's completely sandboxed, and I don't log into anything with it on my personal machine. It's VERY nice to have this as an isolated environment, and the extra VRAM means that I can run my own local models, and it's got enough beef to do long-running tasks (right now I have it chugging through several gigs of images and building embeddings for them with DINOv2) -- that's the sort of local workload that would crush a Raspberry Pi, but the Macbook is hitting 17 images per second -- all managed by OpenClaw.

All that to say, don't let the naysayers get you down. I bought my Mac Mini last week and have been really happy with it as an isolated environment. Way better than futzing around with VMs. The always-on nature of OpenClaw means that it's nice to be able to restart my personal laptop or do gaming or whatever else I want and I'm not fighting for GPU resources in the background.
by Raywob | 2026-02-19 16:04:33+00:00
Haven't tried GPT-OSS-20B yet — the MOE approach is interesting for keeping VRAM usage down while getting better reasoning. 85 t/s on a 3060 is impressive. I'll look into that.

I've been on Qwen3 8B mostly because it was "good enough" for the mechanical stages (scanning, scoring, dedup) and I didn't want to optimize the local model before validating the orchestration pattern itself. Now that the pipeline is proven, experimenting with the local model is the obvious next lever to pull.

The Qwen3 4B 2507 claim is interesting — if the quality holds for structured extraction tasks, halving the VRAM footprint would open up running two models concurrently or leaving more room for larger contexts. Worth testing.

Thanks for the pointers — this is exactly the kind of optimization I haven't had time to dig into yet.
by piokoch | 2026-02-19 16:04:48+00:00
"The kings of medieval France were fascinated by the Mongols, who they saw as great empire builders."

Well, surprising, as they were supporting military actions against Mongols, plus medieval France was nothing like Mongols empire in terms of social live organization, way of fighting wars (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_and_Truce_of_God).

Later, in XV century, France started to turn into Mongols-like regime, but those weren't medieval times.
by monkpit | 2026-02-19 16:04:49+00:00
2012-2014 ish. I had a job which often involved searching for specific part numbers, and at some point during that job quotes stopped giving me exact results. They’d give me something close but incorrect. Like “ABC123” would show me “ABC456”. The real part numbers in question were much longer, in the range of 20-30 chars, so sometimes it was hard to notice that the search had ignored my quotes at first.

They might have fixed it in more recent years, but to me that was when the tide started shifting in the mentality behind google search as a product/service
by reenorap | 2026-02-19 16:05:10+00:00
Remember when "experts" said that tariffs would cause skyrocketing inflation and a recession?

Remember when "experts" said that airplanes would fall out of the sky and Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid would get decimated?

None of it happened. Government programs were cut and workers were laid off with generous severance packages and NOTHING HAPPENED a year later.
by CuriouslyC | 2026-02-19 16:05:46+00:00
That was true more mid last year, but now we have a fairly standard flow and set of core tools, as well as better general tool calling support. The reality is that in most cases harnesses with fewer tools and smaller system prompts outperform.

The advances in the Claude Code harness have been more around workflow automation rather than capability improvements, and truthfully workflows are very user-dependent, so an opinionated harness is only ever going to be "right" for a narrow segment of users, and it's going to annoy a lot of others. This is happening now, but the sub subsidy washes out a lot of the discontent.
by wodenokoto | 2026-02-19 16:06:35+00:00
A cheap linksys that has 2.4 and 5 separated is elusive to my 2011 iPad (and so are my AirPods Pro making the other wise beautiful screen on the iPad useless for watching movies at the gym) and the MacBook Pro won’t connect to school WiFi making it useless as a hand-down to my nephew.

No one at school knows anything technical about the WiFi as it’s supplied by a 3rd party.

Both are running latest available software.
by mark_l_watson | 2026-02-19 16:07:19+00:00
I had the privilege of getting a working gig in Singapore for a small AI startup: such a well run country! There is a sense of community for helping by employing people who need jobs, the police were friendly and I felt very safe there (I like to take long walks either early in the morning or late at night and I felt very secure.)

Amazing what the people and government have achieved since the end of WW2. 100% respect for them.

A side comment: I enjoy listening to English language news from many countries around the world to get different viewpoints. News media from Singapore is very interesting, indeed!
by tarruda | 2026-02-19 16:07:25+00:00
Both gpt-oss are great models for coding in a single turn, but I feel that they forget context too easily.

For example, when I tried gpt-oss 120b with codex, it very easily forgets something present in the system prompt: "use `rg` command to search and list files".

I feel like gpt-oss has a lot of potential for agentic coding, but it needs to be constantly reminded of what is happening. Maybe a custom harness developed specifically for gpt-oss could make both models viable for long agentic coding sessions.
by bluGill | 2026-02-19 16:07:31+00:00
You know who they didn't interview: those who regret saving so much. Many of those people are dead and so the regret is something we can only apply on assumption that they would. I've known a few people who unexpectedly died before they hit retirement age. I've know a few people who retired and died suddenly. The vast majority of people in a "first world" country have an expected lifespan of about 80 - but there is a statistical curve and people start dieing in significant numbers at 65, while you are not an outlier until you make it to near 100 (though some exist).

You need to have some emergency savings. You should save for retirement somehow. If you can structure the above as insurance - and you can trust the insurance - (I know a few cases where the insurance type system went bankrupt and those with a "policy got nothing") that is best.

Once the above is taken care of though, you can't take it with you (at least in most religions) so spend it. Save enough, but not too much.