MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by araes | 2026-02-05 22:15:49+00:00
Attempt at real life version (starts with idea they are actually not trustworthy)

- You invite someone to sit in your living room
- There must have been a reason to begin with (or why invite them at all)
- Implied (at least limited) trust of whoever was invited
- Access enabled and information gained heavily depends on house design
- May have to walk past many rooms to finally reach the living room
- Significant chances to look at everything in your house
- Already allows skilled appraiser to evaluate your theft worthiness
- Many techniques may allow further access to your house
- Similar to digital version (leave something behind)
- Small digital object accessing home network
- "Sorry, I left something, mind if I search around?"
- Longer con (advance to next stage of "friendship" / "relationship", implied trust)
- "We should hang out again / have a cards night / go drinking together / ect..."
- Flattery "Such a beautiful house, I like / am a fan of <madlibs>, could you show it to me?"
- Already provides a survey of your home security
- Do you lock your doors / windows?
- What kind / brand / style do you have?
- Do you tend to just leave stuff open?
- Do you have onsite cameras or other features?
- Do you easily just let anybody into your house who asks?
- General cleanliness and attention to security issues

- In the case of Notepad++, they would also be offering you a free product
- Significant utility vs alternatives
- Free
- Highly recommended by many other "neighbors"
- In the case of Notepad++, they themselves are not actively malicious (or at least not known to be)
- Single developer
- Apparently frazzled and overworked by the experience
- Makes updates they can, yet also support a free product for millions.
- It doesn't really work with the friend you invite in scenario (more like they sneezed in your living room or something)
by danpalmer | 2026-02-05 22:16:09+00:00
My point is that at the point of moving, or creating a new deployment, it's perfectly reasonable to say "how do we get off the cloud if it goes badly", yet no one says "how do we get onto a cloud if managing a datacenter sucks".

The cloud providers win business with at least some hint of offboarding support, but on-prem doesn't have that same incentive.
by keyle | 2026-02-05 22:16:10+00:00
It's amusing how everyone seems to be going through the same journey.

I do run multiple models at once now. On different parts of the code base.

I focus solely on the less boring tasks for myself and outsource all of the slam dunk and then review. Often use another model to validate the previous models work while doing so myself.

I do git reset still quite often but I find more ways to not get to that point by knowing the tools better and better.

Autocompleting our brains! What a crazy time.
by cermicelli | 2026-02-05 22:16:40+00:00
If that's what clean room means to you, I do know AI can definitely replace you.
As even ChatGPT is better than that.

(prompt: what does a clean room implementation mean?)

From ChatGPT without login BTW!

> A clean room implementation is a way of building something (usually software) without copying or being influenced by the original implementation, so you avoid copyright or IP issues.

> The core idea is separation.

> Here’s how it usually works:

> The basic setup

> Two teams (or two roles):

> Specification team (the “dirty room”)

> Looks at the original product, code, or behavior

> Documents what it does, not how it does it

> Produces specs, interfaces, test cases, and behavior descriptions

> Implementation team (the “clean room”)

> Never sees the original code

> Only reads the specs

> Writes a brand-new implementation from scratch

> Because the clean team never touches the original code, their work is considered independently created, even if the behavior matches.

> Why people do this

> Reverse-engineering legally

> Avoid copyright infringement

> Reimplement proprietary systems

> Create open-source replacements

> Build compatible software (file formats, APIs, protocols)

I really am starting to think we have achieved AGI.
> Average (G)Human Intelligence

LMAO
by hmry | 2026-02-05 22:17:08+00:00
If I, a human, read the source code of $THING and then later implement my own version, that's not a "clean-room" re-implementation. The whole point of "clean-room" is that no single person has access to both the original code and the new code. That way, you can legally prove that no copyright infringement took place.

But when an AI does it, now it counts? Opus is trained on the source code of Clang, GCC, TCC, etc. So this is absolutely not "clean-room".
by ndesaulniers | 2026-02-05 22:17:51+00:00
`asm goto` was the big one. The x86_64 maintainers broke the clang builds very intentionally just after we had gotten x86_64 building (with necessary patches upstreamed) by requiring compiler support for that GNU C extension. This was right around the time of meltdown+spectre, and the x86_64 maintainers didn't want to support fallbacks for older versions of GCC (and ToT Clang at the time) that lacked `asm goto` support. `asm goto` requires plumbing throughout the compiler, and I've learned more about register allocation than I particularly care...

Fixing some UB in the kernel sources, lots of plumbing to the build system (particularly making it more hermetic).

Getting the rest of the LLVM binutils substitutes to work in place of GNU binutils was also challenging. Rewriting a fair amount of 32b ARM assembler to be "unified syntax" in the kernel. Linker bugs are hard to debug. Kernel boot failures are hard to debug (thank god for QEMU+gdb protocol). Lots of people worked on many different parts here, not just me.

https://github.com/ClangBuiltLinux/linux/issues for a good historical perspective.
https://github.com/ClangBuiltLinux/linux/wiki/Talks,-Present... for talks on the subject. Keynoting LLVM conf was a personal highlight (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6l4DtR5exwo).
by eudamoniac | 2026-02-05 22:17:56+00:00
I don't really think voter fraud is a problem. I'm taking issue with the strong assertions without substantiation that it is definitely not happening. Maybe I could research all that, but you haven't, yet your comment earlier was very assertive that it is not happening. This tends to be always what happens in these discussions. I've seen posts like yours probably hundreds of times and never had the sources you are telling me to find included in the posts.

That this is such a hot political topic would lead me to believe that these sources would have been compiled somewhere for easy verification. If they aren't, that is strange; if they are, why is it never posted?
Show HN: Atomic Afterglow – Local-first audio analysis (Librosa/Streamlit)
by phasesequencer | 2026-02-05 22:18:02+00:00
I got frustrated with existing DJ metadata tools acting as "black boxes"—uploading my audio to cloud servers and giving confident (but often wrong) key detection for minimal/tech-house tracks.

So I built Atomic Afterglow. It’s a Python-based analyzer that runs in the browser but processes audio locally (zero retention/no uploads).

How it works:

Engine: Built on Librosa and Streamlit.

Drop Detection: Instead of finding the "quietest" section, it uses a rolling RMS window to find the deepest structural energy trough in the middle 60% of the track (the breakdown/mix point).

Harmonics: Uses the Krumhansl-Schmuckler algorithm to generate the Top 3 Key candidates (Camelot formatted) with confidence margins, rather than forcing a single result on ambiguous tracks.

Repo (Open Source): https://github.com/phasesequencer/atomic-afterglow

I'd love to hear if the key detection holds up on your more complex or detuned tracks.
by mauritsd | 2026-02-05 22:18:07+00:00
This kind of thing gets posted every couple of months. Databases like Pinecone and Redis are more cost-effective and capable for their special use case, often dramatically so. In some circumstances the situation favours solving the problem in Postgres rather than adding a database. But that should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. For example, if you run something at scale and have an ops team the penalty of adding a second database is much smaller.

(I run a medium-sized Postgres deployment and like it, but I don't feel like it's a cost-effective solution to every database problem.)
by d4rkp4ttern | 2026-02-05 22:18:20+00:00
This sounds very promising. Using multiple CC instances (or mix of CLI-agents) across tmux panes has always been a workflow of mine, where agents can use the tmux-cli [1] skill/tool to delegate/collaborate with others, or review/debug/validate each others work.

This new orchestration feature makes it much more useful since they share a common task list and the main agent coordinates across them.

[1] https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools?tab=readme-o...
by JohnFen | 2026-02-05 22:18:41+00:00
I avoid software that I know to be problematic. Also, I firewall off all outgoing network traffic by default, and whitelist very sparingly.

For my smartphone, I run a bare minimum of apps and refuse to install new ones without an extremely good reason. I also pipe all smartphone data through a VPN I run at home, specifically so that I can run it through my firewall and make the block-by-default policy I mentioned above cover the phone as well.
by NewSmoke38 | 2026-02-05 22:18:45+00:00
Location: India
Remote: Yes!, but can do on-site/hybrid in Pune, Gurgaon, Delhi, Noida
Role: Back-end engineer intern/full-time
Willing to relocate: Yes, but want visa sponsorship.

Technologies:

Backend: Javascript, Typescript, Node.js, Express.js, Python, Django
Databases & Cloud Storage: PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Cloudinary,
Developer Tools: Git, GitHub, Cursor, JWT, Postman, Google OAuth, Redis, Celery
DevOps: AWS, Vercel, Render, Railway, Docker, SSH

Résumé/CV:https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Qo3kXp6XRaOlBJfXC2cswzcBwnOVHHjB7Hi4wda19dc/edit?usp=share_link

Email: shivanialive2007@gmail.com

Github: https://github.com/NewSmoke38

I am a backend dev on a gap year just after high school.

- currently architecting a webhook delivery system from scratch.
- active contributor to PostHog, Apache Airflow, and freeCodeCamp, currently have several PRs in review/merging.
- taught backend dev on freeCodeCamp (worlds largest coding youtube channel!)
- currently leading a team of 9 devs in a freeCodeCamp cohort for one month!

Video Link - https://youtu.be/KOutPbKc9UM?si=0i0aafEyRFC6OToo
by chasd00 | 2026-02-05 22:18:46+00:00
> If you don't care about code quality, maintainability, readability, conformance to the specification, and performance of the compiler and of the compiled code, please, give me your $20,000, I'll give you your C compiler written from scratch :)

i don't know if you could. Let's say you get a check for $20k, how long will it take you to make an equivalent performing and compliant compiler? Are you going to put your life on pause until it's done for $20k? Who's going to pay your bills when the $20k is gone after 3 months?
by foldor | 2026-02-05 22:19:01+00:00
In Canada there's been a big problem with stolen cars lately. Mostly trucks, and other high value vehicles though. Selling them locally isn't feasible, but there's a criminal organization that's gotten very good at getting them on container ships and out to countries that don't care if the vehicles are stolen. So even with tracking, there's nothing people can do. Stopping it at the port is the obvious fix, but somehow that's not what is being done. Probably bribery to look the other way.
by Terr_ | 2026-02-05 22:19:16+00:00
IMO popular fictional characters are a good illustration. Tell it its name is Count Dracula living in Transylvania, and it'll "thirst" for blood and find sunlight "painful."

Switching the fictional character to "HelperBot, AI tool running in a datacenter" switches the outcomes, but it doesn't make those qualities any less-illusory than CountDraculatBot's.
by rstuart4133 | 2026-02-05 22:19:19+00:00
It's true that if you always have free RAM, you don't need swap. But most people don't have that it can always be used as a disk cache. Even if you are just web browsing, the browser is writing to disk stuff fetched from the internet in the hopes it won't change, the OS is will be keeping all of that in RAM until no more will fit.

Once the system has used all available RAM if has for disk cache it has a choice if it has swap. It can write write modified RAM to swap, and use the space it freed for disk cache. There is invariably some RAM where that tradeoff works - RAM use by login programs, and other servers that haven't been accessed in hours. Assuming the system is tuned well, that is all that goes to swap. The freed RAM is then used for disk cache, and your system runs faster - merely because you added swap.

There is no penalty for giving a system too much swap (apart from disk space), as the OS will just use it up until the tradeoff doesn't make sense. If your system is running slow because swap is being overused the fix isn't removing swap (if you did you system may die because of lack of RAM), it's to add RAM until swap usage goes down.

So, the swap recipe is: give your system so much swap you are sure it exceeds the size of stuff that's running but not used. 4Gb is probably fine for a desktop. Monitor it occasionally, particularly if your system slows down. If swap usage ever goes above 1Gb, you probably need to add RAM.

On servers swap can be used to handle DDOS from malicious logins. I've seen 1000's of ssh attempts happen at once, in an attempt to break in. Eventually the system will notice and firewall the IP's doing it. If you don't have swap, those login's will kill the system unless you have huge amounts of RAM that isn't normally used. With swap it slows to a crawl, but then recovers when the firewall kicks in. So both provisioning swap and having loads of RAM prevent DDOS's from killing your system, but this is in a VM, one costs me far more per month than the other, and I'm trying fix to a problem that happens very rarely.
What's the hardest thing about tracking your validated learnings?
by localeyes | 2026-02-05 22:19:21+00:00
Hey All

Lean Startup / customer development works great until you try to actually keep track of what we've validated.
Our Assumptions get written down, interviews summarized, experiments run, learnings captured… then everything gets hard to track. Spreadsheets are a bit clunky, Notion seems overkill for this use case, and three months later it's hard to track why we pivoted or dumped an idea.
We built ourselves a dead-simple single-page board just to stop losing that history: idea → segment → pain → hypothesis → riskiest assumption → validation method → execution → actual learning. Nothing fancy, no bloat.
Before I assume that's a common pain, I'd rather hear from people who do this stuff more than I:

Could you walk me through the last time you ran real validation (customer convos, tests, etc.). How did you actually record and organize what you learned?
What was the hardest/annoying part about keeping it all together as things moved fast?
What have you tried so far (spreadsheets, Notion, physical notes, rituals, apps, whatever) and where did it break down?

Stories welcome, no sales pitch coming, just trying to understand if this is worth polishing further.
Thanks!
by libraryofbabel | 2026-02-05 22:19:29+00:00
This is such a lovely balanced thoughtful refreshingly hype-free post to read. 2025 really was the year when things shifted and many first-rate developers (often previously AI skeptics, as Mitchell was) found the tools had actually got good enough that they could incorporate AI agents into their workflows.

It's a shame that AI coding tools have become such a polarizing issue among developers. I understand the reasons, but I wish there had been a smoother path to this future. The early LLMs like GPT-3 could sort of code enough for it to look like there was a lot of potential, and so there was a lot of hype to drum up investment and a lot of promises made that weren't really viable with the tech as it was then. This created a large number of AI skeptics (of whom I was one, for a while) and a whole bunch of cynicism and suspicion and resistance amongst a large swathe of developers. But could it have been different? It seems a lot of transformative new tech is fated to evolve this way. Early aircraft were extremely unreliable and dangerous and not yet worthy of the promises being made about them, but eventually with enough evolution and lessons learned we got the Douglas DC-3, and then in the end the 747.

If you're a developer who still doesn't believe that AI tools are useful, I would recommend you go read Mitchell's post, and give Claude Code a trial run like he did. Try and forget about the annoying hype and the vibe-coding influencers and the noise and just treat it like any new tool you might put through its paces. There are many important conversations about AI to be had, it has plenty of downsides, but a proper discussion begins with close engagement with the tools.
by thedanbob | 2026-02-05 22:19:30+00:00
> Bradbury’s stories are about people, deeply real and deeply feeling people. ... and less interested in exactly how the ray guns worked.

Maybe this is why I never really got Bradbury. When I read scifi, I can't help but consider the logic of the world that's being described, and Bradbury's worlds aren't really logical (e.g. who would live on such a strict timetable? wouldn't all the singing and rhyming be annoying? how is the house still being powered?). But it makes a lot more sense if the point is to convey feelings. Kind of like an impressionist painting I suppose.
by bob1029 | 2026-02-05 22:19:33+00:00
I think there is another philosophy where the agent is domain specific. Not that we have to invent an entirely new universe for every product or business, but that there is a small amount of semi-customization involved to achieve an ideal agent.

I would much rather work with things like the Chat Completion API than any frameworks that compose over it. I want total control over how tool calling and error handling works. I've got concerns specific to my business/product/customer that couldn't possibly have been considered as part of these frameworks.

Whether or not a human needs to be tightly looped in could vary wildly depending on the specific part of the business you are dealing with. Having a purpose-built agent that understands where additional verification needs to occur (and not occur) can give you the best of both worlds.
by phil21 | 2026-02-05 22:20:01+00:00
> This idea that there's some kind of difference between me watching you in public and Flock watching you in public is, quite frankly, bogus.

If you followed me around all day taking photographs of my every move for no other reason than you felt like it, I would very likely have recourse via stalking and harassment laws.

There is no difference to me that some company does it via technology.

If I'm interesting enough to get a warrant for surveillance of my activities - fair game. Private investigators operate under a set of reasonable limits and must be licensed in most (all?) states for this reason as well.

It's quite obvious laws have simply not caught up with the state of modern technology that allows for the type of data collection and thus mass-surveillance that is now possible today. If you went back 50 years ago and asked anyone on the street if it was okay that every time they left the house their travel history would be recorded indefinitely they would talk to you about communist dystopias that could never happen here due to the 2nd amendment.
by mothballed | 2026-02-05 22:20:12+00:00
Yes the rich have "all the cards" but the thing about societal reorganization is things get completely flip-flopped and the fact society recognizes you as owning a mansion and a screw factory today doesn't mean that they won't recognize Castro's lieutenant as controlling it tomorrow.

Possessions that are "yours" are only yours insofar as you can either defend it or others recognize it as yours. Thus you end up with situations like "Barbeque" in Haiti owning the streets and much of the rich's land/assets are now magically in the hands of barbeque or his crew and whatever money that one thought they could use to resist that turned out to not be their money anymore. The "rich" thus still hold all the cards but who is rich and who isn't isn't the same as when it started.
by trueno | 2026-02-05 22:20:20+00:00
i think the topic of "what data backend" gets super conflated into many different variations of what the hell people need it for. discussions here go so many different directions. some people are building simple webapps, some are building complex webapps that need to scale for a gazillion users, some are building local apps, some are just tinkering, some are thinking broadly about how their backend needs to sync with a datalake->some data warehouse at an org, yadda yadda ya.

i personally like postgres myself for just about all use cases that must be shared with others (app with more than one client that might be providing CRUD updates or anything really that demands a central data store). ive used sqlite a couple times with WAL to try and make a small app shared between 2-3 people who all would contribute updates thru it but it wasnt ideal. for postgres so many features/extensions its concurrent writes are fast as hell and if you just want to one-shot a solution then you cant go wrong, but it's ofc not the same as sqlite setup.

i think a lot of the pain with postgres is just learning to effectively be a knowledgeable db admin of sorts. its somewhere between being a competent devops guy and a dbadmin expert all in one. if you're actually doing some kind of production deployment it is kinda scary hoping you've got everything set up right. even supabase which makes this whole process trivial to get going requires an understanding of not-always-understood security premises that just make things spooky.

lot of words to say i dont get much out of these discussions tbh. theres just too many use cases and variables in everyones working/hobby lives im not sure that there is a proverbial bottom to any of it. some will use sqlite and some will use postgres and some will use some weird thing no ones heard of because they're afraid to rawdog sql and just want immediate graphql capability to be the main mode of data retrieval. some will show up here and talk about why you need redis in the middle.

its too much noise so i just keep using postgres because its free and boring and fast. end of the day i just want to make stuff people can use. it's a hard endeavor to do well alone, if you dont have a team of other experts who can help you put all the puzzle pieces together on how to deploy things the right way and also add pieces like redis or whatever... it's just a lot. it's hard to find where to get started. sqlite is the only solution that really by nature of what it is seems to champion the lonely developer, but the tradeoffs are big if you're trying to make something that should get used by many people.
by latchkey | 2026-02-05 22:20:28+00:00
I quickly run out of the JetBrains AI 35 monthly credits for $300/yr and spending an additional $5-10/day on top of that, mostly for Claude.

I just recently added in Codex, since it comes with my $20/mo subscription to GPT and that's lowering my Claude credit usage significantly... until I hit those limits at some point.

2012 + 300 + 5~200... so about $1500-$1600/year.

It is 100% worth it for what I'm building right now, but my fear is that I'll take a break from coding and then I'm paying for something I'm not using with the subscriptions.

I'd prefer to move to a model where I'm paying for compute time as I use it, instead of worrying about tokens/credits.
by Kirby64 | 2026-02-05 22:21:07+00:00
It doesn't take a lot of 'complexity' in income to balloon up complexity. Any brokerage activity will generate quite a few additional forms for 1099-B, 1099-DIV, etc. Still not super complicated, but I keep seeing people discuss this as if you only have W2s and nothing else... which isn't usually true, especially for someone who is likely to be using OpenClaw.