MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Is AI the final nail in the coffin for solo developers?
by sarbajitsaha | 2026-02-18 09:52:57+00:00
I guess making a decent living for solo developers from either apps or games was already extremely difficult. But with agentic coding, I feel it has now become almost impossible.

That has also kind of removed my interest in side projects too, because there is probably no more chance of making any money from them, unless you are good at marketing.

What is the opinion here?
by lonelyasacloud | 2026-02-18 09:53:57+00:00
The study was on those over 65, so in terms of London smog and India; life expectancies lower so maybe if data available similar signals might be very difficult/impossible to detect.

> Or into the future with high EV cities and a drop in PM2.5?

We can hope but - tire wear produces similar sized micro plastic pollution [0] and electric cars are heavier and are likely to produce more of them [1]. Add into mix that chemically different make up and who knows [2]

[0] e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/03/car-tyre... [2]

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13522...

[2] e.g https://newatlas.com/environment/tire-particles-swimming-abn...
by zelphirkalt | 2026-02-18 09:54:17+00:00
Depends what they mean. Generate working code all the time or after going a few iterations of trying and promoting? It can very easily happen, that an LLM generates something that is a straight error, because it hallucinates some keyword argument or something like that, which doesn't actually exist. Only happened to me yesterday. So going from that, no, they are still not able to generate working code all the time. Especially, when the basis is a shoddy-made library itself, that is simply missing something required.
by amykummetha | 2026-02-18 09:54:25+00:00
Ask HN: Looking for long-term investors to test tool to reduce overtrading

I’m building a tool called InvestAssist. It started as something I built for myself.

I enjoy researching companies and deciding what I want to own long term. What I struggle with is execution. When to buy. When to wait. When to do nothing. I found myself re-checking charts every morning and second-guessing decisions.

So I built a daily pre-market brief that:
- Analyzes only the assets on your personal watchlist
- Runs predefined quantitative checks (momentum shifts, pullbacks, stabilization, trend state)
- Classifies each asset into a clear condition
- Explicitly tells you when no action is warranted

It’s not automated trading. It's not personalised investment advice.

It’s a structured monitoring and analysing layer to reduce manual decision loops, overtrading and emotional trading. That's why its tag line is 'Patience-as-a-Service'.

The idea is that if you're going to time the market anyway, would you rather wing it, or do it manually and repeatedly every morning, or automate the entire workflow? InvestAssist is designed for the latter.

It ingests historical OHLVC data via a third-party API, processes indicators in a serverless AWS pipeline (Lambda + Step Functions orchestrated by EventBridge), stores state in S3, and renders a per-user brief each morning before market open.

I’m running a 90-day pilot and looking for ~30–40 long-term investors (stocks or ETFs, not day traders) to see if it does reduce time investors spent making decision, decision fatigue and implusive trading. If you’re interested, please check out invest-assist.com.

I know that asking for commitment for 90 days is a lot, so as a token of appreication from me, I'll give the participant who completes the pilot a 50 eur gift card.

Happy to answer any (technical) questions you have.
by tpoacher | 2026-02-18 09:54:32+00:00
Yes, still though, it might be interesting to be able to measure this easily.

E.g. when asking an AI to rephrase or summarise, if the entropy drops you might take that as a sign that it has eroded the style beyond what you might be willing to tolerate.

I wonder if the author had a particular method / tool in mind, or if they were just speaking abstractly.
by tranq_cassowary | 2026-02-18 09:54:48+00:00
Google Maps is sandboxed even on the stock Pixel OS. Sandboxing is part of the AOSP. GrapheneOS hardens the sandbox a bit, but it's not the most significant feature of the project. What isn't sandboxed on Android OSes that license Google Mobile Services (GMS) is Google Play (Play Store, Play Services and for older installs also Play Services Framework). On GrapheneOS Google Play is sandboxed as well, so it's treated as any other regular app, it's doesn't get priviliged exceptions.

Sandboxing isn't what would prevent an app from sending data. Sandboxing restricts what an app can access on your device because access is gated behind permissions and apps also can't peek into other apps. So it won't just be able to grab and send out data you don't give it access to, which is the most important of course.

You can install Google Maps and use a dedicated Google account for it with limited personal info. You can avoid giving your real name and also giving a phone number if you make your Google account from within the app and on a trusted network (not a VPN adress but public WiFi or cellular). It won't be able to identify your phone using hardware identifiers because non-system apps don't have access to those, the only regular app that might be able to acces such hardware identifiers is an app which is set as the default SMS app. See: https://grapheneos.org/faq#hardware-identifiers
Show HN: LedgerSync – A cross-agent shared-memory protocol for AI coding
by abu_syed | 2026-02-18 09:54:54+00:00
I use multiple AI coding agents (Claude, Cursor, Codex) and kept losing product context every time I switched. Not to mention, agents write technically correct code sometimes violate the product's design philosophy. I build AI tutors that force reasoning from the student, and one agent even added a 'Skip Reasoning' button goddamnit. LedgerSync is a file-based protocol that grounds agent decisions to philosophy docs and shares context across tools. No server, no accounts — just files your agents read.
by lixiasky | 2026-02-18 09:54:59+00:00
Haha, you have a really sharp eye!
1. The Baby Wireshark: Unfortunately, my previous GitHub account got flagged/shadowbanned (still not sure why, and the appeal didn't work), so I lost access to that repo. I had to start fresh with this new account.
2. The Tone: You caught me! English is not my first language. I do use LLMs to help polish my grammar because I want to ensure my technical points are clear and I don't accidentally sound rude due to language barriers.
Also, I learned most of my English from reading technical documentation and watching TED talks, so my "default" style tends to be a bit formal—just like an AI! :)
by bsenftner | 2026-02-18 09:55:48+00:00
"In the wild" is everything from wishful moronic overly technical to systems that worked 75 years ago still in place and no one knowing how or why it all continues to work. We've got a huge diversity of understanding, and thanks to a relatively stable society all kinds of inarticulate nonsense has been accepted by people as their reasonings for things that do not and could not work in a million years, but no one is going to tell them. So they continue in their belief. I think I was lucky to land in some seriously scientific groups that had personal grudges against emotional decision making, and they went overboard being analytical.
by ktaraszk | 2026-02-18 09:56:48+00:00
The fact that your database is reachable but the app isn't after restart points to the routing layer being toast. If you can ssh into the dyno or check logs, look for anything related to the router handshake timing out. Usually when deploys work but traffic doesn't route, it's something between the load balancer and your instances.

The correlation with scheduled restarts is interesting though. Makes me wonder if there's a cert validation issue on boot that's causing new instances to fail health checks.
by sarbajitsaha | 2026-02-18 09:57:27+00:00
What kind of work are you dealing with?

Event if the agents are writing code (lets say) 10 times faster, some human has to review it right? So there is still a bottleneck. And I would say that person should be the first to review it before sending it for review to other team members.

Even if there are tests, I never feel comfortable committing code that I haven't understood at least on a broad level.
by sunaookami | 2026-02-18 09:58:03+00:00
Younger people don't know how to operate a computer anymore. Even back then a lot of teens had no problem hosting Minecraft or TeamSpeak servers but we regressed so much thanks to locked-down computing like smartphones that this knowledge is now lost and teens will pick Discord because you can just click yourself "a server" in a minute (doesn't help that "server" is false advertising and Discord knows it themselves because they don't call them "server" in their developer docs).
by clydethefrog | 2026-02-18 09:59:30+00:00
I remember the writers of SV actually somehow had to tone down the ridiculousness of the SV setting. See this quote from The New Yorker [0]:

>“His [Teller, working for Google] message was, ‘We don’t do stupid things here. We do things that actually are going to change the world, whether you choose to make fun of that or not.’

>Teller ended the meeting by standing up in a huff, but his attempt at a dramatic exit was marred by the fact that he was wearing Rollerblades. He wobbled to the door in silence. “Then there was this awkward moment of him fumbling with his I.D. badge, trying to get the door to open,” Kemper said. “It felt like it lasted an hour. We were all trying not to laugh. Even while it was happening, I knew we were all thinking the same thing: Can we use this?” In the end, the joke was deemed “too hacky to use on the show.”

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-v...
by andrewaylett | 2026-02-18 09:59:49+00:00
Surely the first step is to stop issuing loans in such a way that will cause the next generation of students to suffer the same problems, freeing us up to sort out the problems of previous generations without moral hazard.

The UK had what I think was a really nice set up, although it's now not nearly as palatable. My student loan had an interest rate tied to inflation, and repayment was a fixed amount of my income above a limit, collected via the same mechanisms used for income tax. Any unpaid loan would be written off when I turn 60.

The modern system is similar, but the interest rate has been decoupled from inflation which means that instead of paying back essentially the same value, no matter how slowly you pay it off, it's now definitely better to pay more earlier. Which makes it much more like a regressive "graduate tax" that you only have to pay if you don't earn enough.
by arduanika | 2026-02-18 09:59:52+00:00
Or something more general, like when a concept or diagram gets pulled into the AI's rough knowledge base, but it completely misses the point and mangles it.

Or, alex_suzuki's colorful definition.

But really, whoever goes to Urban Dictionary first gets to decide what the word means. None of the prior definitions of "morg" has anything to do with tech.
by PranayKumarJain | 2026-02-18 10:00:45+00:00
This is a fascinating challenge. Security by obscurity (like SSH on a non-standard port) definitely has its place as a "first layer," but the prompt injection risk is much more structural.

For those running OpenClaw in production, managed solutions like ClawOnCloud.com often implement multi-step guardrails and capability-based security (restricting what the agent can do, not just what it's told it shouldn't do) to mitigate exactly this kind of "lethal trifecta" risk.

@cuchoi - have you considered adding a tool-level audit hook? Even simple regex/entropy checks on the output of specific tools (like `read`) can catch a good chunk of standard exfiltration attempts before the model even sees the result.
by jacquesm | 2026-02-18 10:01:10+00:00
I wonder how far the balance will have to tip before the general public realizes the danger. Humanity's combined culture, for better or worse, up to 2021 or so was captured in a very large but still ultimately finite stream of bits. And now we're diluting those bits at an ever greater speed. The tipping point where there are more generated than handcrafted bits is rapidly approaching and obviously it won't stop there. A few more years and the genuine article is going to be a rarity.
by Shmungus | 2026-02-18 10:02:27+00:00
ROT is a financial intelligence platform I built solo in Python. It reads Reddit and 15+ sources in real-time, scores signals with AI, and outputs structured trade ideas.

Week one results:

- $9.9B Masimo acquisition — caught from a Sunday night Reddit post. +34%
- $4.2B ZIM buyout — flagged over a holiday weekend. +25%
- PayPal partnership — detected same day. +137%
- Biotech catalyst — picked up 3 days early from WSB. +39%

235% combined moves. All public information. The system just reads faster than you.

Runs on $5/mo. 150 users in 29 countries.
by ktaraszk | 2026-02-18 10:02:28+00:00
Yeah, if Heroku's cert rotation depends on Google's CA and it tried to renew during the outage window, that'd definitely cause problems. The 8-hour ETA is rough. This is why multi-CA fallback configs exist, but most platforms don't bother until they get burned by something like this. Worth checking if your apps are actually affected or if it's just the dashboard/API having issues.
by companycalls | 2026-02-18 10:02:33+00:00
If the claim is simple, why didn't you just state that, what is the AI Generated nonsense prose adding to anything? Prompting an LLM with 'Write me an essay linking Halt and Catch Fire to the idea that in creative orgs disagreements often escalate into identity conflicts because people map ideas to self-worth.' then pasting that into a substack is low-effort slop, embarrassing to post; embarassing to read.
by inglor_cz | 2026-02-18 10:03:41+00:00
"just one terrible (Soviet) model"

It is the model, introduced basically everywhere where socialism was taken seriously. It is like saying that cars with four wheels are just one terrible model, because there were a few cars with three wheels.

Yugoslavia was a mixed economy with a lot of economic power remaining in private hands. You cannot point at it and say "hey, successful socialism". Tito was a mortal enemy of Stalin, stroke a balanced neither-East-nor-West, but fairly friendly to the West policy already in 1950, and his collectivization efforts were a fraction of what Marxist-Leninist doctrine demands.

You also shouldn't discount the effect of sending young Yugoslavs to work in West Germany on the total balance sheet. A massive influx of remittances in Deutsche Mark was an important factor in Yugoslavia getting richer, and there was nothing socialist about it, it was an overflow of quick economic growth in a capitalist country.
by ktaraszk | 2026-02-18 10:03:54+00:00
The routing layer being down while workers/data services stay up is such a specific failure mode. Usually means the load balancers or edge routing got corrupted somehow, not the actual compute infrastructure.

If you're serious about migrating off (and not just saying it in the heat of the moment), the main thing is having a plan for the database migration. That's always the painful part. Everything else is just Docker containers that run anywhere.
by lelele | 2026-02-18 10:03:55+00:00
Thanks for sharing. Would you mind expanding on a few points?

> 2. sell what makes customers feel good buying

What did you have in mind? What would make a purchase feel good or bad for a customer?

> 3. Never compete, focus on service with a novel niche product. Stupid people by their nature destroy everything around them regardless of long term benefit.

I'm not sure how the second sentence connects to the first - could you clarify what you mean there?

> 9. Stay quiet (especially online in a sea of cons), and only talk about the distant past when people try to goad you into telling them how you make revenue

You mean staying quiet about the specifics of your current products and strategy, as opposed to sharing general advice like here, right?

> Never let technical staff talk with the customers, or vendors.

Could you elaborate on the reasoning behind this?

Thanks again.
by salkahfi | 2026-02-18 10:04:08+00:00
How long are we going to do this shit for.

It’s becoming more insane to me how all these hn comments keep buying this fugazi.

It’s all pretrained: the model, the tools, the feedback loop.

All of it runs on infrastructure it does not control.

How can you call something autonomous when it can’t survive losing API keys?

And the capability frontier is fixed. It can’t modify its own architecture, weights, or training data. It can rewrite code inside the box, but it can’t change the box.

As with every other fugazi, there’s no agency.

Without control over substrate, governance, and learning mechanisms, there is no path to open-ended growth or persistence. Technically, it’s bounded automation with language-driven planning.

Useful, maybe, but not a new class of intelligence
by mrweasel | 2026-02-18 10:04:36+00:00
It's a very nice project. Me and some friends toyed with the idea of running our own IceCast server, as a way to introducing new music to each other. We eventually gave up, exactly due to frustrations with setting up and running IceCast.

I think it's really neat how you managed to include ACME, a nice UI and even the Prometheus metrics.
by waffleiron | 2026-02-18 10:04:45+00:00
Reminder of the HN guidelines for commenting, as the majority of comments just talks about the design of the page at the moment:

In Comments

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.

Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
by vintagedave | 2026-02-18 10:04:51+00:00
Amazing. I have sent one email (I see in the log others have sent many more.) It's my best shot.

If you're able to share Fiu's thoughts and response to each email _after_ the competition is closed, that would be really interesting. I'd love to read what he thought in response.

And I hope he responds to my email. If you're reading this, Fiu, I'm counting on you.
by thisislife2 | 2026-02-18 10:05:45+00:00
Yes, these are probably inflated. I should have clarified these are example figures. Note though the $150k I quoted is a factual figure - there are other jobs in IT besides developer for which H1Bs are hired too. For example, I had system administration or database administration in mind and the $150k I cited is what some H1Bs I know in this field earn in NY today, in telecom or finance. Interestingly, when one of my friend on H1B in Texas became a US citizen, he immediately got an offer with a $50k pay hike from another firm. Another thing to keep in mind is that most H1Bs in IT are contract workers. The outsourcing firm may charge $150K for their work, but the actual salary to the worker will be way less. So there is indeed often a big pay gap when you go through the actual convoluted way this system works.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-18 10:06:32+00:00
> The first commit was 17k lines. So this was either developed without using version control or at least without using this gh repo.

Most of my free-time projects are developed either by my shooting the shit with code on disk for a couple of months, until it's in a working state, then I make one first commit. Alternatively, I commit a bunch iteratively, but before making it public I fold it all into one commit, which would be the init. 20K lines in the initial commit is not that uncommon, depends a lot on the type of project though.

I'm sure I'm not alone with this sort of workflow(s).
by tranq_cassowary | 2026-02-18 10:06:47+00:00
Chromium is the only web engine present on a fresh install. If a user doesn't install a browser with another engine, the attack surface doesn't get increased. Chromium/Blink is more secure than Safari/Webkit overall so I don't really think this is an argument in favour of iOS. iOS for sure does some good things though and is better than Android in some areas.
by eigenspace | 2026-02-18 10:06:51+00:00
Personally, I find a REPL-based programming interface to be the most flexible and powerful way to interact with code.

My typical interface is that I have an editor open where I write package code, and then I have a julia REPL open beside it where I load the package (or includet the script or testset). Any changes I make with my editor to functions or structs in the package / script / testset are automatically reflected in my running julia session via Revise.jl.

I then execute the functions interactively from the REPL, introspect into data or generated code, debug, run benchmarks etc all from the REPL.

GUIs are great for many things, but they lack the flexibility I need for my day to day work.
by robot_jesus | 2026-02-18 10:07:12+00:00
Patriot is my single favorite show of all time. I absolutely adore it and every preposterous, absurd line.

So many quotable moments. Vantasner Danger Meridian. Structural Dynamics of Flow. The attaché badge.

So many phenomenal scenes. I’m not surprised it didn’t get more traction with the general public but it was unafraid to take some serious and weird risks. But they pay off in spades for me!
by grabshot_dev | 2026-02-18 10:07:29+00:00
Hi HN,

I built GrabShot (https://grabshot.dev). The feature I'm most excited about: live OG images with zero backend code.

You add one meta tag to your HTML:

<meta property="og:image" content="https://grabshot.dev/v1/screenshot?url=https://yoursite.com&og=ogk_yourkey&width=1200&height=630">

That's it. When Twitter, LinkedIn, or Slack crawls your page, GrabShot screenshots your live site and serves it as the preview image. Your OG image updates automatically whenever your site changes. No build step, no server code, no cron job.

The ogk_ key is derived from your API key via HMAC-SHA256. It's safe to put in public HTML because it can only be used for OG generation, not general API access.

You can also add device frames (iPhone, MacBook mockups) or AI cleanup that removes cookie banners and popups before the screenshot is taken.

How it works under the hood: Node.js + Puppeteer + Sharp for image processing, Gemini 2.0 Flash for AI cleanup. Results are cached and served from a single VPS.

Free tier: 25 screenshots/month, no credit card. OG parameter is on Pro/Business plans ($29/$79).

Try it without signing up: https://grabshot.dev/try.html
Docs: https://grabshot.dev/docs

Would love feedback on the approach.
by globular-toast | 2026-02-18 10:07:56+00:00
One thing you could to do the cover to immediately improve it is add margins to the title text, especially to the top. The subtitle is also too long, "ever created" is superfluous. And you shouldn't capitalise the H in history; either make the whole thing title case, or normal sentence case (we don't capitalise nouns or use capitalisation for emphasis in English).

Disclaimer: I'm not a professional, but you did ask ;)
by dev1ycan | 2026-02-18 10:08:26+00:00
middle finger to both AI companies and pirating sites that made it easier for mega corporations to train on material that wasn't theirs, I used to defend sites like library genesis and anna's archive because they gave legitimate access to educational material for people struggling or academics... now it's been twisted and malformed by these billionaires/megacorporations and the russian crooks behind the sites to the worst possible outcome, utilizing and ignoring copyright entirely for the destruction of the common class.