MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Context Harness – Local first context engine for AI tools
by __parallaxis | 2026-02-26 06:26:01+00:00
Context Harness is a single Rust binary that gives AI tools like Cursor and Claude project-specific memory. It ingests docs, code, Jira tickets, Slack threads, and anything else into a local SQLite database, indexes them with FTS5 and optional vector embeddings, and exposes hybrid search via CLI and an MCP-compatible HTTP server.

I built this because I kept hitting the same problem: AI tools are powerful but have no memory of my complex multi-repo project. They can't search our internal docs, past incidents, or architecture decisions. Cloud RAG services exist, but they're complex, expensive, and your data leaves your machine. I wanted something I could point at my sources and just run `ctx sync all`.

Quick start:

# Install (pre-built binaries available for macOS/Linux/Windows)
cargo install --git https://github.com/parallax-labs/context-harness.git

# Create config and initialize
ctx init

# Sync your data sources (filesystem, Git, S3, or Lua scripts)
ctx sync all

# Search from CLI
ctx search "how does the auth service validate tokens"

# Or start the MCP server for Cursor/Claude Desktop
ctx serve mcp

What it does differently from other RAG tools:

- *Truly local*: SQLite + single binary. No Docker, no Postgres, no cloud. Local embeddings (bundled or pure-Rust) so semantic and hybrid search work with zero API keys. Back up your entire knowledge base with `cp ctx.sqlite ctx.sqlite.bak`.

- *Hybrid search*: FTS5 keyword scoring + cosine vector similarity with configurable blending. Works without embeddings too (keyword-only mode); with local embeddings you get full hybrid search offline.

- *Lua extensibility*: Write custom connectors, tools, and agents in Lua without recompiling anything. The Lua VM has HTTP, JSON, crypto, and filesystem APIs built in.

- *Extension registry*: `ctx registry init` installs a Git-backed community registry with 10 connectors (Jira, Confluence, Slack, Notion, RSS, Stack Overflow, Linear, etc.), 4 MCP tools, and 2 agent personas.

- *MCP protocol*: Cursor, Claude Desktop, Continue.dev, and any MCP-compatible client can connect and search your knowledge base directly.

Embeddings: you can run *fully offline* — the default build uses local embeddings (fastembed with bundled ONNX on most platforms, or a pure-Rust tract path on Linux musl and Intel Mac). No API key required. Optional: Ollama (local LLM stack) or OpenAI if you prefer. Keyword-only mode needs zero deps. There's no built-in auth layer; it's designed for local or trusted network use.

Stack: Rust, SQLite (WAL mode), FTS5, mlua (Lua 5.4), axum, MCP Streamable HTTP. MIT licensed.

GitHub: https://github.com/parallax-labs/context-harness

Docs: https://parallax-labs.github.io/context-harness/

Community Registry: https://github.com/parallax-labs/ctx-registry

If you find it useful, a star on GitHub is always appreciated.

Would love feedback on the search quality tuning (hybrid alpha, candidate counts) and the Lua extension model.
by onion2k | 2026-02-26 06:26:08+00:00
Pick a lane or perish.

Literally every industry has examples of businesses that don't excel at anything and still do well enough to carry on. In fact, in most industries, it's actually hard to see any business that's clearly leading on any specific front because as soon as it becomes an obvious factor in gaining market share the competing businesses focus on that area as well.
by NooneAtAll3 | 2026-02-26 06:26:17+00:00
> The only way they will is if the hyperscalers and AI companies start to implode

you're missing the picture that it's not companIES - the crisis primarily was caused by only one company OpenAI buying out wafers

but even more than that - that wafer buyout is *an excuse* used by cartel - there are several mechanisms that could have eased out most of the problem (e.g. Samsung selling old equipment) that was not done to ride the money wave

(also said "hyperscalers and AI companies" existed in spring 2025 too, yet the price was low)

the winners will not be the ones who build new fabs - but ones who'll have enough money and government subsidies/import taxes to protect such investments after cartel decides to oversupply again, flushing the price down
by Davidzheng | 2026-02-26 06:27:00+00:00
Once the majority of work at a company can be done by AI, Anthropic has an alternative revenue stream to selling AIs to that company--directly competing with that company with a completely integrated AI system. There's of course many barriers to entry/various advantages of incumbents--but it's possible to see a world in which the company selling the AI has a huge advantage too.
Show HN: LucidExtractor – Extract web data in plain English, no selectors
by yukendiran_j | 2026-02-26 06:27:18+00:00
I built a web scraping tool where you describe the data you want in plain English instead of writing CSS selectors or XPath.

The problem: Traditional scrapers break when websites change their HTML structure. You spend more time maintaining selectors than actually using the data.

How it works: Send a URL + an AI prompt like "extract all product names and prices as JSON" and the AI reads the page like a human, returning structured data.

Tech stack: FastAPI backend, Gemini 2.5 Flash for extraction, Playwright for rendering, deployed on Google Cloud Run.

Free tier: 500 credits, no credit card required. Would love feedback from HN on the approach and pricing.
by tolerance | 2026-02-26 06:27:35+00:00
Cormac McCarthy appears to be an exceptional case in this respect. I skimmed through a book about it once. Early on he basically earned his keep through grants and book sales. I think he persuaded one of his old ladies to get a job while he wrote. And apparently he was always writing; pitching one book in the middle of working on another. I guess film and television soon followed.
by selridge | 2026-02-26 06:27:54+00:00
>You're implicitly assuming that what you asked the LLM to do is unrepresented in the training data.

This is just as stuck in a moment in time as "they only do next word prediction" What does this even mean anymore? Are we supposed to believe that a review of this paper that wasn't written when that model (It's putatively not an "LLM", but IDK enough about it to be pushy there) was trained? Does that even make sense? We're not in the regime of regurgitating training data (if we really ever were). We need to let go of these frames which were barely true when they took hold. Some new shit is afoot.
by cyanydeez | 2026-02-26 06:28:10+00:00
Still, isn't part of the hedonic treadmill merely marketers dream of number goes up? If your software needs more specs, then surely it's doing more work and the hardware boys will gladly give you a monitor with more hz.

So, the causal link is more: why would software makers need to optimize when it benefits them to pretend the user _needs_ more hardware. Especially in the games realm. Surely going from 60hz to 240hx refresh rate was a practical loss in benefits per hz halfway through. But it ate up hardware resources along the way.
by lunar-whitey | 2026-02-26 06:28:34+00:00
A full scale exchange would be much, much worse than Europe in 1918. Against a peer adversary, ABM systems can protect 1 city at the very most.

There will be people on both sides who know how many warheads are required, and in which locations, to destroy the capability to generate electricity and refine petroleum at a national scale. This kind of industrial capacity, once destroyed, takes years to replace. Reserves of fuel, food, and clean water will not last nearly that long. You are looking at hundreds of millions of deaths in weeks or months.

The only people who can seriously entertain this live close enough to a high value target to be assured of their immediate demise.
by mullingitover | 2026-02-26 06:30:00+00:00
> The more extreme possibility would be the government compelling Anthropic to retrain Claude—to strip the safety guardrails baked into the model's training, not merely modify the access terms.

Sounds a lot like compelled speech to me (and knowing these goons it's exactly what they want). This isn't just 'you have to sell me the aluminum you make,' it's 'you have to write custom software for me to do my evil bidding,' when the whole company was founded on a moral compunction against doing that very thing.
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-02-26 06:31:05+00:00
it's funny how in this article, in order to prove its humanity to an AI, a human must become essentially a mindless robot (and serial killer, but that's the icing):

https://medium.com/the-haven/i-am-worried-about-these-newest...

and in the real world to prove humanity one must shed the skills one generally learns in pursuit of a humanities degree.
by kalleboo | 2026-02-26 06:31:51+00:00
Luckily we're not in the spinning HDDs thrashing a working set in and out of 128 MB of primary memory days anymore. We have laptops that ship with SSDs that read/write at 6 GB/s.

I was experimenting with some graphics algorithm and had a memory leak where it would leak the uncompressed 12 MP image with every iteration. I was browsing the web when waiting for it to process when I wondered why it was taking so long. That's when I noticed it was using 80+ GB of swap just holding onto all those dead frames. It finished and meanwhile it had no noticeable performance impact on whatever else I was doing.
by aggieNick02 | 2026-02-26 06:32:08+00:00
The new notepad is a buggy embarrassment. When you disable the "Continue previous session" option you can very easily lose unsaved changes:

0) Set "When Notepad starts" option to "Start new session and discard unsaved changes"

1) New file

2) Type "abc" - note the "X" to close the file changes to a "O" (pretend that's a circle) to indicate unsaved changes

3) Save file - "O" changes back to "X"

4) Type "def" - "X" changes back to "O" because "def" is not on the file on disk

5) Undo, "def" disappears, "O" incorrectly remains...

6) Redo, "def" reappears, "O" incorrectly changes back to "X"

7) Close file. No prompt to save unsaved "def". Reopen file. "def" is gone
by zeta0134 | 2026-02-26 06:32:46+00:00
The need to use optimal patterns didn't go away, but the techniques certainly did. Just as a quick example, it's usually a bad idea now to use lookup tables to accelerate small math workloads. The lookup table creates memory pressure on the cache, which ends up degrading performance on modern systems. Back in the 1980s, lookup tables were by far the dominant technique because math was *slow.*
by jchw | 2026-02-26 06:33:31+00:00
> Coloring book will be available only on Copilot+ PCs. To use Coloring book, you will need to sign in with your Microsoft account.

Can someone please explain why these two things are ever simultaneously true? You buy the stupid Copilot+ PC that has "AI" NPU hardware, right? So the AI features should be able to run locally. But if you have to sign in with a Microsoft account, then surely, it doesn't run locally, which begs the question, why does it require a Copilot+ PC at all?

Not even going to bother asking "does anybody want this to begin with" because at this point there is no real need to bother asking that.
by mbgerring | 2026-02-26 06:33:48+00:00
People who produced the works LLMs are trained on are not compensated for the value they are now producing, and their skills are increasingly less valued in a world with LLMs. The value the LLMs are producing is being captured by employees of AI companies who are driving up rent in the Bay Area, and driving up the cost of electricity and water everywhere else.

Your surprise to people’s objections makes sense if you can’t count.
by jen729w | 2026-02-26 06:34:01+00:00
> 2. Can you explain how an ants sense of smell leads to anthills?

Ant 0: doesn’t seem to be dangerous here. I’ll drop a scent.

Ant 1: oh cool, a safe place. And I didn’t die either. I’ll reinforce that.

Ant 142,857,098,277: cool anthill.
by wavemode | 2026-02-26 06:34:42+00:00
Statistical models generalize. If you train a model that f(x) = 5 and f(x+1) = 6, the number 7 doesn't have to exist in the training data for the model to give you a correct answer for f(x+2)

Similarly, if there are millions of academic papers and thousands of peer reviews in the training data, a review of this exact paper doesn't need to be in there for the LLM to write something convincing. (I say "convincing" rather than "correct" since, the author himself admits that he doesn't agree with all the LLM's comments.)

I tend to recommend people learn these things from first principles (e.g. build a small neural network, explore deep learning, build a language model) to gain a better intuition. There's really no "magic" at work here.
by jraph | 2026-02-26 06:35:06+00:00
I'm not judging, I'm telling you (a bit snarkily, true) that your brain activity won't stop with something else doing (a part of) your work. And this is the subtility that makes the statement true.

Even if it were false, the difference in energy consumption is not significant, compared to what the AI uses, and also taking in account all the energy that you use to live (housing, heating, products and food you buy whose production uses energy, etc).

And about the water, it's even worse, even disregarding the AI: at rest, maybe you'll drink, I don't know, 1L less (that's a wild number!), compared to the 100(s) L that you use to cook, wash, clean, etc, not even counting the water used to produce stuff you buy.

But again, you won't do nothing. We are commenting on a post of a guy who was fired and couldn't help creating something. That's how we are. We hate boredom.

Worse: the way our societies are setup makes is so that ai, if it helps at all, likely won't free us from work, it will likely just make us collectively produce more garbage. That's more energy consumption, not less.
by Vespasian | 2026-02-26 06:35:36+00:00
I agree that OpenAI could and most likely will execute quite well on ads.

What I'm uncertain about is how much the ability of Google to set defaults matters.

Setting Gemini as the "AI" on phones, automatically integrated with all "daily" services could matter a lot. They have a platform ready to go and are pushing hard to make themselves really attractive. All while being very profitable.

Apple on the other hand will be in a strong position to negotiate a good deal with competitors to OAI and my suspicion is that "good enough AI" is all most people need.

And of course there is the financial reality that OpenAI does not only need profits, but profits on an enormous scale. Just being successful would mean they missed the mark.

My personal guess is that Microsoft will fully buy them at some point in the future but I'm not, confidence enough to bet any money on it.
by retrac | 2026-02-26 06:35:48+00:00
I know this sounds insane but I've been dwelling on it. Language models are digital Ouija boards. I like the metaphor because it offers multiple conflicting interpretations. How does a Ouija board work? The words appear. Where do they come from? It can be explained in physical terms. Or in metaphysical terms. Collective summing of psychomotor activity. Conduits to a non-corporeal facet of existence. Many caution against the Ouija board as a path to self-inflicted madness, others caution against the Ouija board as a vehicle to bring poorly understood inhuman forces into the world.
by TedDallas | 2026-02-26 06:35:53+00:00
Ugh, memories. I'm so old my first web browser was Mosaic and I think I saw this. I used a provider called Texas MetroNet that served up dial-up PPP connections for $45 a month on a speedy 28.8K baud modem. Days of wonder, I tell ya.

New days of wonder seem to be ahead, though. That said, there's about 100X more angst involved these days.
by ChaitanyaSai | 2026-02-26 06:36:05+00:00
The whole next word thing is interesting isn't it. I like to see it with Dennett's "Competence and comprehension" lens. You can predict the next word competently with shallow understanding. But you could also do it well with understanding or comprehension of the full picture. A mental model that allows you to predict better. Are the AIs stumbling into these mental models? Seems like it. However, because these are such black boxes, we do not know how they are stringing these mental models together. Is it a random pick from 10 models built up inside the weights? Is there any system-wide cohesive understanding, whatever that means?
Exploring what a model can articualate using self-reflection would be interesting. Can it point to internal cognitive dissonance because it has been fed both evolution and intelligent design, for example? Or these exist as separate models to invoke depending on the prompt context, because all that matters is being rewarded by the current user?
by brookst | 2026-02-26 06:36:33+00:00
Not the person you asked, and “novel” is a minefield. What’s the last novel anything, in the sense you can’t trace a precursor or reference?

But.. I recently had a LLM suggest an approach to negative mold-making that was novel to me. Long story, but basically isolating the gross geometry and using NURBS booleans for that, plus mesh addition/subtraction for details.

I’m sure there’s prior art out there, but that’s true for pretty much everything.
by KingOfCoders | 2026-02-26 06:37:48+00:00
I also prefer CLI over MCP and wrote about it, and why (also when to use #FUSE to integrate AIs and data):

https://www.tabulamag.com/p/a-new-way-to-integrate-data-into

My latest CLI instead of MCP:

https://github.com/StephanSchmidt/human (alpha)
by stephenr | 2026-02-26 06:38:12+00:00
I'm not sure what's more depressing about this.

NodeJS bros recreating the "curl via http request" bullshit that was the scourge of shared hosting php 20 years ago; or

Deploying something to production that has never been tested even once, and then pretending it's the platform hosts' fault for doing something you didn't anticipate.
by lotsofpulp | 2026-02-26 06:38:12+00:00
If having less money hurts people, then the government should give them more money.

Consumption taxes incentivize reducing waste and is pro environment. Isn't that what California is about?

>people acquire it just for the sake of acquiring more and building their personal power. It seems that wealth is used to build more mechanisms of rent-seeking to further extract money from people who make their money through labor.

So why are you a proponent of earned income taxes? Those hit people who make their money through labor. What you want is land value taxes, those hit people who make money through rent seeking (including tech companies whose assets sit on valuable land).
by biztos | 2026-02-26 06:38:53+00:00
I’ve seen a lot of his work IRL, he was one of the artists at the now (sadly) defunct Aurum Gallery where I was a regular visitor.

For better or worse, he’s mostly know in the “street/urban art” world (which is much bigger than graffiti). And one of the features of a lot of the art in that scene is high technical mastery paired with “low” / populist motifs and composition.

Seen up close these works are really quite amazing, and I respect the artist choosing to make the things that can make him a living. Even Brice Marden, at some point, just kept making those trademark squiggles and cashing those checks.
by hollerith | 2026-02-26 06:38:54+00:00
>Reserves of fuel, food, and clean water will not last nearly that long [i.e., years].

Untrue. A survey done by nuclear-war planners in the 1980s found that there is enough food stored on or near farms to feed half the US population for about 3 years. During peacetime, most of this food is fed to farm animals, but there is no reason it cannot be used to keep people alive instead.

This food, mostly grains and soybeans, must be milled to be nutritious to people, but the (diesel-powered) equipment to do the milling tends to be stored near the food, so the trucks that bring the food from the farms to the population centers can just bring the milling equipment, too (and maybe the equipment for toasting grains, which I understand is widely done to grains fed to farm animals).

Water is continuously falling out of the sky and can also be obtained from underground.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-02-26 06:39:19+00:00
> No, they're posting LLM output all over this story, not just this subthread, and it's pretty tiresome.

Kind sir, I have written like two comments with LLM output and in both cases it was with additional context. [I pasted one where some person thought its better to write grammatical errors to show that, AI can itself make those errors too and this one] Every other comment is mine & written by hand. (or well one comment was written by voice with handy that people recommended here :D)

Now there's a point you can make if my writing can be sloppy and I totally would get that but sometimes I get over-enthusiastic about a particular topic.

This comment, I made weeks ago seem apt for me to use here and please don't mind if I use the same right now as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=46986446

I think I only tried to reference LLM in ironical situations in both the times that I shared or atleast so were my intentions. Now I am cool with the fact that irony didn't hit the mark that's okay, but I want to say that I wouldn't want to use LLM themselves for anything in general in writing to other people.

Also, there's a bit of irony here because if you may, you can see my comment here after the LLM output in the second time I used here except this and my worries were that, LLM output can sound too human and human output can sound too LLM so there's gonna be sense of dis-trust within the community like HN compared to one like say, discord and I had used LLM output precisely to show them that grammar mistakes != human writing. [https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=47157571]

Sir, to give you context, Do you really think that I am gonna be using LLM to unironically write my messages?, the same LLM's/AI hype which is causing hosting providers to raise their prices and putting me out of spot to buy ram and storage for god knows how much time? If that's the case, I hope you can know what my priorities are.

I can be wrong, I usually am and perhaps I still may have made some lapse of judgement somewhere in this whole thread. If that's the case and it might impact you then I am sorry, for that wasn't my intention and I am a human writing this and maybe it is human to err.

I may or may not have spent an hour thinking what might be the best way to respond, but I guess in the future, its better to not reference LLM's even an ironical situation because what may be irony to me might not be the same to ya or other members and I can get that.

Do you know what the real irony is right now? Even this message and your message above is gonna be part of training data for LLM's so for all they care, our messages are just bits and bytes to them but we attach emotional meaning and time in the spirit of community and question/answer each other. LLM's are so baked in irony that its the tower of bable of irony.

Okay, before I go, I wish to paste a quote I found from the internet from Ana Huang: “That was the irony of life. People always reminisced about the good old days, but we never appreciated living in those days until they were gone.”

[Source: https://quotefancy.com/quote/4027241/Ana-Huang-That-was-the-...]
by Tade0 | 2026-02-26 06:39:58+00:00
There exists domestic supply, it's just not scaled up:

https://www.goodram.com/en/

You don't see their products in stores too often as they're focused on B2B - particularly the automotive sector.

That being said I have a 128GB memory stick from this manufacturer and I hope they make the most out of this windfall.