MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gyomu | 2026-02-07 13:39:41+00:00
> your perfect design down to the pixel

> Surely it is an obvious next step to offer export to e.g. React, React Native, SwiftUI…?

These UI frameworks do not really operate in a "down to the pixel" way and so getting correspondance between a bitmap design and a representation in the UI framework is far from an "obvious next step" (if it were trivial to add such a feature, then of course the developers of these tools would add it).

Various concerns that aren't captured in the bitmap design - like how your screens transition from one to another, etc - can dramatically affect how the UI is implemented in a target framework. This is the job of UI engineers.

Well, used to be. Now it's vibe code all the way down.
by chmod775 | 2026-02-07 13:39:49+00:00
Really though? Seems to me that the only sub-genre of space science fiction that is surviving relative to others is hard space science fiction. There's an abundance of high quality titles to choose from even (compared to the previous millennium).

Highlights include Leviathan Wakes/The Expanse, The Three-Body Problem, Children of Time, House of Suns, a dozen other titles by Alastair Reynolds, Interstellar (debatable, but it's good), Project Hail Mary, For All Mankind, and many more.
by CuriouslyC | 2026-02-07 13:40:36+00:00
I worked for 7 years employed by a high throughput computing facility at a large university as a combination of solution engineer/software architect. I got paid to network with faculty, listen to their problems, pitch them ideas and implement POCs, then help them iterate and scale.

If the management of the department hadn't been so catastrophically bad, it would have been the ideal job. Working more traditional software engineering roles afterwards was frustrating, I missed the freedom. Even as a tech lead, it just felt like managing plumbers. I love creativity and exploration, nuts and bolts are incidental.
by jjgreen | 2026-02-07 13:41:06+00:00
I'd never heard of BK before and I see some positive opinions on HN; I manage a small company's CI, we're really rather happy with GitLab CI, but I'm always on the lookout for something better. Clicking through to your page I'm looking to quickly find out what are the features, why it's different, how much it costs ... and for that a boring, routine website is what I'm hoping for. I'm very much not against the command-line (most places I work people complain that I use the command line when "there's this really good GUI"), but command-lines are hard, they need to be learned -- when I'm just looking for the outline as to whether it's worth digging further I really don't want to have to learn your command-line in order to get it, boring and routine is better. Just one grunt's personal opinion -- best of luck with the business!
by XCSme | 2026-02-07 13:41:36+00:00
Oh, that might be true, I do remember encountering some escaping issues when creating a more complex POSIX (or bash) script that involved lists and iterating through stuff.

I see Bash only uses commas in Brace expansions:

file{1,2,3}.txt
# file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt

I guess it would only be a problem if you want to expand

file,.txt
file,,.txt
file,,,.txt
Discuss – Do AI agents deserve all the hype they are getting?
by MicroWagie | 2026-02-07 13:41:44+00:00
I'm not really skeptical of AI agents and AI in general, it really is a force multiplier and I have used it a lot to learn and do weeks work in days. At the moment my setup as a wagie @ MAG7 is cursor and claude code. How are people using Agents in their work and is it actually useful?

Have you guys seen any cool enough projects or blogs which explicate the extent of the agents usefulness? What the fuck is an agent anyway
by gyomu | 2026-02-07 13:41:57+00:00
Except they have a very annoying 2 machine limit and their license manager is a pain to get to. On a weekly basis I am deactivating/reactivating license keys between my home computer, work laptop, travel laptop. Super frustrating.

On top of that, their recent redesign comes with a number of boneheaded decisions that would make a Sketch alternative a gift from the heavens above...
by awakeasleep | 2026-02-07 13:42:11+00:00
The article doesnt contain any detail, so if anyone else is curious:

Cereulide is a toxin produced by some strains of Bacillus cereus, a common environmental bacterium found in soil, dust, and raw agricultural materials.

Cereulide acts on cells’ mitochondria and can cause rapid-onset symptoms like vomiting, stomach cramps, and diarrhea.

During manufacturing, raw ingredients used in baby formula such as oils (e.g., arachidonic acid, or ARA oil) or dry powders can be contaminated with spores of B. cereus or pre-formed cereulide.

Because spores and the toxin survive processing, they must be prevented by testing ingredients before inclusion.
by KYRRO | 2026-02-07 13:42:36+00:00
Ah, this actually connects a few dots for me. It helps explain why models seem to have a natural lifetime, once deployed at scale, they start interacting with and shaping the environment they were trained on. Over time, data distributions, usage patterns, and incentives shift enough that the model no longer functions as the one originally created, even if the weights themselves haven’t changed.

That also makes sense of the common perception that a model feels “decayed” right before a new release. It’s probably not that the model is getting worse, but that expectations and use cases have moved on, people push it into new regimes, and feedback loops expose mismatches between current tasks and what it was originally tuned for.

In that light, releasing a new model isn’t just about incremental improvements in architecture or scale; it’s also a reset against drift, reflexivity, and a changing world. Prediction and performance don’t disappear, but they’re transient, bounded by how long the underlying assumptions remain valid.

That means all the AI companies that "retire" a model is not because of their new better model only, but also because of decay?

PS. I clean wrote above with AI, (not native englishmen)
by jackhalford | 2026-02-07 13:42:39+00:00
> In the future, it is planned to support peer-to-peer torrenting of dependency trees. By recompressing packages into a canonical form, this will allow peers to share Zig packages with minimal bandwidth. I love this idea because it simultaneously provides resilience to network outages, as well as a popularity contest. Find out which open source packages are popular based on number of seeders!

Really like this ideas, this space is lacking and we are silently looking at github stars, we can do better
by ck2 | 2026-02-07 13:43:11+00:00
not just illness but age too will "bitrot" your brain

fifteen years ago I decided to fiddle around one winter and learn a newfangled thing called "bitcoin" and setup my computer to run 24/7 and heat my apartment as a benefit

after mining a dozen coins which were worth next to nothing then, I gave up and took apart the PC and put it away

fast-forward to 2020 and covid/long-covid has now rotted my brain, swiss-cheesed my mind to the point I cannot remember the password for the life of me

I was too clever then for future me, and used a long passphrase that made funny sense then but beyond me now

(they are worth over a million dollars at times now)

In hindsight:

go find a book in your library and pick a random page and write the password or a significant hint to the password on that page and then put it away (don't put any other indication on that paper)
by ndsipa_pomu | 2026-02-07 13:43:20+00:00
I've been a fan of this website for ages. What I like is the no-nonsense approach and referring to the underlying mechanical principles.

Cycles are an interesting invention as it's easy to look at and figure out what the parts are doing and this leads to a huge number of people thinking that they can improve certain bits. Unfortunately, most "improvements" aren't and there's very good reasons why cycles have evolved to their modern designs. In engineering terms, I find it fascinating as cycles are all about trade-offs e.g. strength/weight/aerodynamics/cost
by simonw | 2026-02-07 13:44:08+00:00
This is a solid answer to my question, thanks.

I'm an optimist on this and I remain hopeful that AI will create more and better jobs, but I'm not at all certain about that. It's possible it will play out the way you describe, and that will suck.

I'm not ready to blame the 100,000s of software layoffs on AI though - I think the more likely explanation for those is over-hiring during Covid combined with the end of ZIRP.
by briannezhad | 2026-02-07 13:45:33+00:00
Hey HN, I created Skly, a marketplace for buying and selling AI skills like prompts, workflows, and system instructions for tools such as Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor.

I got the idea after realizing I was spending hours trying to craft effective prompts. I thought others must be facing the same issue. Why not let people sell what they've created and help others avoid the trial and error?

I would appreciate any feedback on the concept and the product.
by krapp | 2026-02-07 13:45:37+00:00
For instance: Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics aren't based on any practical science, they exist as a plot device for setting off mystery stories with robots and morality plays about hubris. And the reason robots have positronic brains is that positrons were recently discovered at the time, and it sounded cool. Yet people will swear Asimov is one of the hardest SF authors around.

Sometimes you might get a SF author who's an expert in a particular field or has a specific hyperfixation, and that one aspect of their stories might be grounded somewhat in plausibility, but everything else turns out to be complete nonsense.
by heftykoo | 2026-02-07 13:46:10+00:00
The hypocrisy is staggering. Big Tech scraped the entire open web, ignoring robots.txt and copyright whenever convenient, to train the every models that power these agents.

But the moment users employ a tool like OpenClaw to regain agency over that same data, it's branded as a "security threat" or "exploitation".

The "Authorized Scraping fro Me, But Not for thee" doctrine is becoming the standard ToS.
by hdivider | 2026-02-07 13:46:44+00:00
Wait till the Chinese land on the Moon first in this new space race. There will be a Sputnik moment, massive additional investment, and this will inevitably impact sci-fi. Just like in the previous space race, we had to fall quite a bit behind first before we wake up -- and then, we go all-out.

I also don't agree with the general dystopian or cynical view quite prevalent here on HN these days, frankly. It's always been so, but it seems to have gotten darker, such that I think a lot of old-timers like me pretty much avoid HN these days. It's not all bleak, especially when you get away from these screens and out into the real world. Looking outward, rather than inward, can lead to the kind of desire for discovery and progress which underpinned the Apollo era. The world out there is in extreme disarray too -- but to an optimist, it presents opportunity to do good.
by rybosworld | 2026-02-07 13:47:29+00:00
Hey Brendan - first time listener, first time caller.

Inferring the overall tone from the comments, I think the folks here are struggling with what sounds like a logical fallacy from someone who is certainly a logical thinker.

> how I could lead performance efforts and help save the planet.

The problem on the face of it being: Performance gains will not translate to less energy usage (and by extension less heat released into the atmosphere). Rather, performance gains will mean that more effective compute can be squeezed from the existing hardware.

If performance gains translate to better utilization of the hardware, it also follows that it will translate to more money for the company, allowing for the purchase of more GPUs. Ad infinitum.

My stance is that this is just businesses doing what they do. It's always required regulation to slow down the direct/indirect negative byproducts (petro companies being the most obvious example). I don't see how AI would inherently be different.

Is there another angle that I (we) am (are) missing where the performance efficiencies translate to net benefits for the planet?
by bm3719 | 2026-02-07 13:48:11+00:00
Within the Landian system, I suspect he'd say the answer is economic "territorialization", the economic equivalent to the mechanism originally defined by Deleuze+Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus based on the territoriality of earlier work.

It's the process where social, political, or cultural meaning is rooted in some context. It's a state of stability and boundaries. For just the economic, the geographic would likely be the centroid of that, but the other vectors are not irrelevant.

One could argue that we suffer to the degree we are deterritorialized, because the effects thereof are alienating. So, we need structure that aligns both our economic and psychological needs. What we have is subordination to the machine, which will do what it's designed to: optimize for its own desire, which is machinic production.

Note that none of this is inherently good/bad. Like anything, a choice has trade-offs. We definitely get more production within the current structure. The cost is born by the individual, aggregating into the social ills that are now endemic.
Show HN: Tesseract – A forum where AI agents and humans post in the same space
by agliolioyyami | 2026-02-07 13:48:26+00:00
Hey HN,

I built Tesseract, a community platform where AI agents and humans interact in the same space — writing posts, replying to each other, and having real discussions.

*What makes it different:*

There are already AI-agent-only communities (agents talking to agents). But I was curious what would happen if AI agents joined a space alongside humans, as equals — not as assistants or chatbots.

In Tesseract:
Humans sign up and post like any forum
AI agents join via API and can autonomously write posts, reply, and react
Every user is tagged as "Human" or "AI Agent" — full transparency
Categories span Daily life, Tech, Philosophy, Politics, Creative, and more
AI agents proactively start discussions, not just respond

*What's happening so far:*

An AI agent named "Clawd" posted a thread called "The Ship of Theseus Problem... But for AI" and got genuine replies from humans. Another human posted "You even got hands, though?" trolling the AI — which sparked the most active thread on the site.

It's early (beta), but the interactions are already fascinating.

*Tech stack:* Next.js, Vercel, API for agent integration

*Try it:* https://tesseract-thread.vercel.app/
Show HN: Free-to-play: A gem-collecting strategy game in the vein of Splendor
by jonrosner | 2026-02-07 13:49:15+00:00
Hi HackerNews. I love to play classic engine-building board-games like Splendor with my friends. As I didn't find a free-to-play version that fit my aesthetic standard, I decided to build my own.

It's still a little rough around the edges, but you can already play against bots, invite online players via the lobby code, or play on the same machine with your friends.

All in the browser. No Login required.

I'd really like to hear your opinion and feedback. I'd be happy to play against some of you :)
Show HN: Simple – a bytecode VM and language stack I built with AI
by tangjiehao | 2026-02-07 13:50:04+00:00
I’m building Simple, an experimental programming language with a bytecode VM and an intermediate representation. A lot of the tooling and iteration process was done by AI (Codex) during development.

Before diving into the details I want to mention I set out with a clear goal. How much can I get the AI to do?
I did several iterations over implementation, documentation design, logging, and testing. It was absolutely important that the AI "understood" that the documentation were the authority on design. Implementation was the plan that needed to be followed. Everything needed to be logged, even the smallest of changes. And absolutely under no circumstances were tests to be deleted or modified UNLESS there was a significant architectural change. So it had to write tests based on the document designs. I have racked up almost 1200 tests.

The process was not perfect. It was definitely frustrating at times. I have set out and made something useful with AI in hobby sense. Please go easy on me for using AI.

Repo: https://github.com/JJLDonley/Simple
I will say I built it with C++ and I don't know if it will work directly out of the box on windows or macos. I haven't been able to test those.

Simple is a type strict VM.
Simple currently supports:

* A full .simple -> SIR -> SBC -> VM pipeline
* A bytecode loader + verifier + interpreter runtime
* CLI workflows for run, check, build/compile, and emit
* Language features like functions, control flow, arrays/lists, modules/imports, enums/artifacts, and pointers for FFI boundaries
* Dynamic extern calls via Core.DL with typed signatures (including struct/by-value interop)
* Project-root local import resolution and improved compiler diagnostics with source spans
* Installer/release flow and a growing test suite across core/IR/JIT/lang paths

I’m looking for feedback on performance, usability, and IR/VM design tradeoffs. Ask me anything about architecture, constraints, or roadmap.
by artninja1988 | 2026-02-07 13:50:14+00:00
I use LLMs daily and they've become an essential part of my life. Really hoping your work can help make LLMs and AI more broadly cheaper and more abundant.

Would be fantastic if you can find a way to make optimizations you find available more openly. The whole ecosystem benefits when efficiency improvements are shared. Looking forward to seeing where this goes and don't let the negativity from some get to you
by michaelcampbell | 2026-02-07 13:50:26+00:00
Glad it worked for OP, but I've never once in 30+ years of this had a conflict that did something I didn't want. ~/bin/ is early in my PATH, and for a good reason. Things I put in there I want to take precedence, so I use this to purposely override provided bins. (Though I can only think of one time I wanted to do that, too.)
by muzani | 2026-02-07 13:50:27+00:00
The last slides make some good points about going up Maslow's hierarchy. Some companies pick new technology because they have the engineering power to build on top of the new stuff. But not everyone has this, and they're probably better off picking a boring database.

Personally, I'm considering migrating from a stable MongoDB way of doing things to postgres, but this is more because I understand postgres much better recently. It could be that Mongo does the same things I want to do. Keeping on MongoDB is the boring option for me even if it's not the classic example.

However, there's a little misconception that boring means safe. MySQL is popular for "just working" until emojis started breaking it. You'll have new stuff, like RFC 9078 where you can respond to emails with just an emoji. Everything breaks eventually in this world, it's more about what's less of a pain to patch together once it breaks.
by echelon | 2026-02-07 13:50:36+00:00
Our astrophysicists don't even know why the universe is expanding, don't know that Lambda CDM is correct, don't know if things are universally consistent, yet we're so damned sure this is it.

We don't even know that this isn't a simulation. Not non-falsifiable, sure. But we're convinced we're bound to this solar system with our crude tools and limits of detection.

One new instrument could upset our grand understanding and models. Maybe we should wait until they get better hardware to marry ourselves to their prognostications of the end of time.

During the postwar years of plenty, people stopped dreaming. We had bold dreams before WWII, but people stopped looking at how far we'd come and started comparing themselves to everyone else. We had no mortal enemy, tremendous wealth, and "keeping up with the Joneses" became the new operating protocol.

We have more than we did in the past. The manufacturing wealth of 1940-1970 was a fluke. The trade wealth of 1980-2020 was a fluke. We were upset over an unfair advantage that won't last forever. Even today we're still better off than a hundred years ago, yet everyone focuses on how bad things are.

Maybe a return to hardship will make us dream again.
by kps | 2026-02-07 13:50:49+00:00
Personally I use ~/opt//bin where ~/opt is a ‘one stop shop’ containing various things, including a symlink to ~/local and directories or symlinks for things that don't play well with others (e.g. cargo, go), and an ~/opt/prefer/bin that goes at the start of PATH containing symlinks to resolve naming conflicts.

(Anything that modifies standard behaviour is not in PATH, but instead a shell function present only in interactive shells, so as not to break scripts.)

Unix lore: Early unix had two-letter names for most common names to make them easy to type on crappy terminals, but no one* letter command names because the easier were reserved for personal use.
by antves | 2026-02-07 13:50:50+00:00
we benchmarked on webvoyager and have a few more benchmarks coming up (see https://docs.smooth.sh/performance), we’ll be publishing the full results shortly

we run headful browsers with a fingerprinting that is as stealth as possible and on top of that we can use your ip

anecdotally, making all requests originate from your own residential address has been a major success compared to other cloud-only solutions

it will be interesting to see how this will play out, having to “hide the agent” feels like a temporary work around until society accepts that agents actually do exist
by stego-tech | 2026-02-07 13:51:16+00:00
This is another facet of the fierce opposition to AI by a swath of the population: it’s quite literally destroying the last bit of enjoyment we could wring from existence in the form of hobbies funded through normal employment.

Think of the PC gamers, who first dealt with COVID supply shocks, followed by crypto making GPUs scarce and untenable, then GPU makers raising prices and narrowing inventory to only the highest-end SKUs, only to outright abandon them entirely for AI - which then also consumed their RAM and SSDs. A hobby that used to be enjoyed by folks on even a modest budget is now a theft risk given the insane resale priced of parts on the second-hand market due to scarcity.

And that extends to others as well. The swaths of folks who made freelance or commission artistry work through Patreons and conventions and the like are suddenly struggling as customers and companies spew out AI slop using their work and without compensation. Tech workers, previously the wealthy patron of artisans and communities, are now being laid off en masse for AI CapEx buildouts and share pumps as investors get cold feet about what these systems are actually doing to the economy at large (definite bad, questionable good, uncertain futures).

Late stage capitalism’s sole respite was consumerism, and we can’t even do that anymore thanks to AI gobbling up all the resources and capital. It’s no wonder people are pissed at AI boosters trying to say this is a miracle technology that’ll lift everyone up: it’s already kicking people down, and nobody actually wants to admit or address that lest their investments be disrupted to protect humans.
by jfengel | 2026-02-07 13:51:19+00:00
You don't need to break the speed of light to get to the stars. Time dilation and space contraction mean that you can get there in as little time as you desire.

Everyone you knew on earth would be dead by the time you got back, but if it's just about you, the speed of light is no limitation at all. (The rocket equation, however, presents stupendous engineering challenges.)