MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by inandoutflux | 2026-02-27 09:03:05+00:00
You forget turnover. Sponsorship isn't a subscription with much value after you built your product. You have a number of people coming in and out on top of those staying put, and those former were probably the most important metric.

AI spewing answers out of the magic box (or even just one-shotting with zero oversight) means developers do not go to the actual website for documentation, do not share as many issues as much and do not talk about the experience of working with tailwind as much - AI performance discourse takes that attention. This means less in-flow, which means the line of stability will be lower even in a vacuum where people have no particular reason to increase the out-flow.

And yet, this isn't a vacuum. I am not arguing it's just that alone. I absolutely believe that people simply stopped valuing code altogether. Why pay for ready solutions when the beepity bopity boop handles custom implementation for you without you even having to ask too much? It's what the OP article here is saying, AI's love custom solutions.
by DiogenesKynikos | 2026-02-27 09:03:22+00:00
> You opened with: the Second Intifada was sparked by Israeli massacres. Now your alleged massacre is Sept 29, the first day of the clashes after Sharon’s visit. That is not a prior massacre that precipitated anything, it is the opening confrontation itself, and you are laundering it with a loaded word.

Those are the exact same thing. The "clashes" you're describing are Israeli forces firing live ammunition at unarmed Palestinian demonstrators in the wake of Sharon's deliberate provocation.

You pulled out the Mitchell Report as an authority on the subject, and it turns out that the Mitchell Report backs me up.

> Calling that a massacre is absurd.

Police opening up with live ammunition into a crowd of unarmed demonstrators, killing 4 and injuring 200 is not a massacre?

> but the Palestinians themselves say armed clash was premeditated and Sharon's visit was just a pretext.

No, no one said the September 29th clashes were premeditated. How would the PLO even be responsible for Israel deciding to open up with live ammunition on a crowd of unarmed Palestinian demonstrators? Did the PLO use mind control on the Israelis?

> Also, Sharon visiting a holy site under police protection is not violence. Mitchell even says holy places must be accessible to all believers.

The Mitchell Report says that Sharon's visit was a deliberate provocation. He wasn't just a random believer visiting a holy site. He was a top Israeli politician (on the verge of becoming prime minister) and a notorious general with a long career of slaughtering Palestinian civilians (including in Lebanon, where he let fascist Christian militias carry out a massacre in a Palestinian refugee camp). He stormed the holiest Muslim site in Palestine with hundreds of police officers. It was a political stunt intended to spark a reaction. One would have to be incredibly naive to think otherwise. Sharon knew that his actions would spark a massive outrage among Palestinians. Or are you claiming that Sharon had no idea what he was doing?

> The 18-month line is about phased interim jurisdiction, not a guaranteed state or full withdrawal.

No, the 18-month deadline is explicitly about full withdrawal of all Israeli forces from virtually the entire West Bank (including Area C) to specific military bases. Israel just completely reneged on that. Netanyahu has boasted about torpedoing Oslo by reneging on that specific requirement.
by kqr | 2026-02-27 09:03:26+00:00
I don't know anything about laboratory uses of agar, but I do use it in cooking. Something that baffles me is that so many recipes (at least in northern Europe) use gelatin when agar works just as well or better. Agar is cheaper, easier to handle, comes in more compact packaging, lasts longer, sets faster, is reversible, fits more food preferences, etc. Why this obsession with gelatin? What am I missing?

The article contains one possible clue: gelatin melts at body temperature. This implies dishes made with gelatin melt in the mouth like chocolate does, but I can't recall experiencing that (at least not to the extent of chocolate) when eating gelatin-based stuff. (And many gels, at least in my opinion, have a better mouthfeel when more solid than liquid.)
by asdff | 2026-02-27 09:03:51+00:00
I've only done one platform gui work (python) but I'd guess this is stuff that is ripe for transpiling since a lot of gui code is just reusing the same boilerplate everyone is using to get the same ui patters everyone is using. Like if I make something in tkinter seems like it should be pretty straightforward to write a tool that can translate all my function calls as I've structured them into a chunk of Swift that would draw the same size window same buttons etc.
by dist-epoch | 2026-02-27 09:04:09+00:00
> I believe automatic programming to be already super-human, not in the sense it is currently capable of producing code that humans can’t produce, but in the concurrent usage of different programming languages, system programming techniques, DSP stuff, operating system tricks, math, and everything needed to reach the result in the most immediate way.

As HN likes to say, only a amateur vibe-coder could believe this.
Show HN: RunVeto – A Simple Kill Switch for Autonomous AI Agents
by JDPatel1729 | 2026-02-27 09:04:15+00:00
Hey HN,

I’m a software engineer with 5 years of experience, and I’ve been building autonomous agents recently using LangChain. I noticed that we are giving these agents too much "autonomy" without enough "governance".

The specific problem I faced was Agent Sprawl/Recursion. A test bot got stuck in a recursive loop and almost ran up a significant OpenAI bill before I noticed and killed the process manually.

So, I’m building RunVeto.xyz as a minimal governance layer—a control plane for agent guardrails. It sits between your agent and the LLM API, framework-agnostic, and integrates with one line of code.

What I’m planning to implement:

Hard-Cap Budgeting: Set strict token/cost limits to kill any task before it breaks the bank.

Global 'Veto' Button: Pause or terminate any active agent process from a central dashboard.

PII Shield: Automatic scrubbing of sensitive data (PII) before it hits the LLM.

'Chain-of-Thought' Audit: Real-time visibility into agent planning logs.

I'm currently pre-MVP and using this landing page to validate the core features and find "founding developers" to guide the roadmap.

I'd love to hear this community's critique. Have you encountered "recursive loops" in your own agent workflows? What’s your biggest operational nightmare with agents?

The landing page has an embedded survey. I’m eager to hear your thoughts.

No fluff, just safety.
by psychoslave | 2026-02-27 09:04:33+00:00
Not everyone operate on same consideration regarding money. The mere fact to be able to donate something that is a significant portion of a median income salary is already the privilege of the most wealthy, so more than that this is the very limited realms of the winner take it all game of the casino or the casino owner. For this class of people, money has nothing to do with what it represents to most people. So there is no way people from these distinct classes can understand each other in term "share of net worth", because they are the same words that refer to completely different realities.
by Paracompact | 2026-02-27 09:04:52+00:00
> Fear is induced by coercion, the threat of negative consequences such as
ostracism and demotion. To be sure, blatant coercion facilitates the denial of
responsibility and thereby compliance with corrupt directives. Such coercion,
however, leaves less room for (perceived) volition, a key precondition for the
dissonance reduction process discussed earlier. Newcomers subject to blatant
coercion have a sufficient justification for their obedience – to avoid the threat –
and thus do not need to realign their attitudes to accommodate the otherwise dissonant behavior. Indeed, blatant coercion may provoke resentment and reactance
against the source of coercion and the targeted behavior (e.g. Nail, Van Leeuwen
& Powell, 1996). The upshot is a greater likelihood of grudging compliance,
whistle-blowing and voluntary turnover (and thus, risk of exposure). Further,
coercion may affect behavior only as long as the pressure is applied. For these
reasons, blatant coercion tends to be an ineffective means of sustaining corruption.

Astute. When the average person is asked to imagine how corrupt leaders operate, I think they tend to overemphasize the effectiveness of simple violence. To foster a corruption that will last, you have to mold the circumstances so that corruption is the only option that makes sense.
by klodolph | 2026-02-27 09:06:02+00:00
> But if you were watching them, was there really no freedom from consequences?

Ah, so I think you may have done a little hop and a jump over a critical, load-bearing term which is “feel like”. You get to observe people who feel like there are no consequences. Their feelings may or may not be accurate.

You can sometimes see people who treat service workers, servants, or subordinates poorly because they feel like it’s permitted and free from consequence. You can also sometimes see people reveal things about themselves when playing games. It’s kind of a cliché that people find out that they’re transgender at the D&D table, and it happens because it’s a “consequence-free way” to act out a different gender role.

Or we can talk about that magic ring that makes you invisible. You know, the ring of Gyges, or that of Sauron. People can’t actually become invisible, but you can sometimes catch them in a situation where they think they can do something wrong and not get caught.
by vishalontheline | 2026-02-27 09:06:20+00:00
This is a crazy question, but I would like to know how close I can get to the following:

I would like to:

- upload a bunch of surf footage

- let it sort through the surfers

- pick the three longest waves surfed by each surfer

- create a montage grouped by surfer, ordered by shortest to longest wave for that surfer.

Thank you!
by maccard | 2026-02-27 09:07:18+00:00
It’s been a while since I worked for a bigger company (not meta) but the problem there was you would have a team who was responsible for feature A and a team responsible for feature B, and if there was any weird interop between the two it just never got resolved because there wasn’t an owner. There was no internal incentive to fix the problem. It wasn’t deliberate but it was structural
by usrnm | 2026-02-27 09:07:31+00:00
> No no, an intelligent person looking at a crude steam engine could see what potential it has. This is not hindsight

Steam engines were known since the first century, at the vert least: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile

It does take a lot of imagination and creativity to come up with new and better ways to use an already existing idea. We're currently just scratching the surface of what LLMs are going to do for us
by zigman1 | 2026-02-27 09:07:39+00:00
I think what you are trying to say is that Hendrix captured a specific sound and won over a generation of listeners, while Knoplfer displayed a mastery of the instrument, rarely seen in the mainstream. However, don't underestimate him, they sold out Wembley 16 nights in a row in '85, I am sure that spring some bands. It's now a bit forgotten, but for a period of few years, Dire Straits were the biggest band in the world.
Knopfler is usually associated with saying "your favorite guitarist's favorite guitarist" :)
by em-bee | 2026-02-27 09:08:11+00:00
steve blank is comparing relationships with institutions to relationships with people and he is suggesting that this also applies to romantic relationships.

i'd like to argue that this is not so. especially not for romantic relationships. yes, people change, and goals change. but in a romantic relationship, the relationship IS the goal. if you grow apart in a romantic relationship, then you have failed the goal itself.

of course this can happen when you discover something about your partner that you just can't bear. but most likely what you discover has always been there and is not a new development.

and that institutional relationship. it ended because it was never a strong relationship to begin with. was it maybe more a relationship with the individuals involved? is there still a personal relationship with that first director?

had they had a stronger relationship with the institution, they would have noticed the change of goals earlier.

to be honest, to me it feels very strange that i would even call on an institution without being aware of what relationship i have with them. when i talk to a company that i have worked with before about a new project, a change in personnel, specifically, a change in my contact person, would be the first thing that tips me off to reevaluate the relationship before talking to them.

because generally relationships are with people. relationships with institutions are defined by a contract. no contract, no relationship.

when a sales or support person moves from one company to another, it is possible that some customers follow, because they felt that they had a relationship with that person, not with the company.
by ildar | 2026-02-27 09:09:42+00:00
The NIST focus on "agent registration/tracking" is the right instinct but the wrong abstraction. Registration is a compliance checkbox — it tells you an agent exists, not what it's doing.

What we actually need is runtime behavioral monitoring: what files is the agent accessing? What network calls is it making? What credentials can it reach? That's where the real threat surface lives.

We've been building exactly this with ClawMoat (open source, MIT) — host-level security that monitors agent behavior in real-time. Permission tiers, forbidden zones, credential isolation, network egress monitoring. Think AppArmor for AI agents.

The gap in NIST's framing: they're treating agents like software to be certified, but agents are more like employees to be supervised. You don't just background-check an employee once — you give them appropriate access levels and monitor for anomalies.

Anyone planning to submit comments to NIST, the deadline is March 9. Would love to see the community push for runtime monitoring requirements, not just pre-deployment certification.
by lelanthran | 2026-02-27 09:10:08+00:00
> Speaking of rolling your own things, i had claude knock out a trello clone for me in 30 minutes because i was irritated at atlassian.

I knocked out a webapp to manage tickets, states, ETA, etc for me and me alone in about 30m, pre-AI.

Note: I have a pre-built very-low-code framework for doing CRUD applications that lets me do ugly but functional webapps.
by globular-toast | 2026-02-27 09:10:11+00:00
The deeper problem is that businesses are now expected to be funded by investors. There was a time when banks funded new businesses with loans, but now most of their lending is mortgages. Banks were better because they would lend to any business they thought wouldn't go bankrupt and weren't subject to FOMO and thinking only about future profits/exit, which they weren't entitled to.

Question is, is it really impossible for businesses to fund themselves with bank loans now? John Kay wrote about this years ago arguing the finance sector is no longer a good thing for society but has become more of a leech: taxing the money supply but not supporting new businesses. I feel like it's only become worse now. Even insurance is barely really insurance any more. It's more like a savings account that you might be able to withdraw from when you need it, but not necessarily.
by rob74 | 2026-02-27 09:10:12+00:00
What I have always wondered about with FE-Schrift: they painstakingly made all glyphs distinguishable, but completely f'ed it up with V and Y: the "stalk" of the Y is vertical and so short that they're very easy to confuse. They could have made the "stalk" slanted, or even curved like in lowercase "g", and most people would have still recognized it as a "Y"...
by RGamma | 2026-02-27 09:10:16+00:00
Given how unstable and aggressive the US government is at the moment others having these weapons seems to be a good idea for balance. Not sure you are aware of the damage Trump is inflicting on international relations.

But personally I wouldn't like to die because some crackpot with the right connections can will rest-of-world to that fate, no matter their affiliation. This escalation of destructive power and the carelessness with which it is justified pretty disheartening to see. Good times create bad people?
by taneliv | 2026-02-27 09:10:22+00:00
Do you speak Portuguese? Are you interested in learning it? I don't know how big a role it plays in making connections and friends in Portugal, and how important those are to you. It may be also more difficult to find English (or Turkish!) speakers in smaller towns compared to big cities.

How stable is the remote role? Are you more likely to be laid off (or the company to cease operations) than turmoil in Turkey? Obviously this is also very subjective speculation, but since you don't mention it, how does it figure into your plans? How well will you be able to find other similar work in Portugal? (Or elsewhere, I would assume your relocation will offer freedom of employment across EU.)
by hdgvhicv | 2026-02-27 09:11:03+00:00
Just like the PC. Or the internet.

In 1995 how many people used the internet in their daily work, of those that did how many was it a curiosity that maybe supplemented their existing business practice (sending a memo via email rather than post for example). Large companies were using large computer mainframes but the majority of employers - the SMEs - weren’t.

By 2005 it massively shifted, and AI seems to be coming faster than the internet and computers in general.

By 2015 non intenet companies were going the way of the dodo. How many travel agents were there per 100k in 1995 compared to 2015?
by piokoch | 2026-02-27 09:11:08+00:00
This is comical.

"Mass domestic surveillance. We support the use of AI for lawful foreign intelligence and counterintelligence missions. But using these systems for mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values"

Translating to human language: mass surveillance in USA "is incompatible with democratic values" but if we do that against, say, Germany or France this is OK. Ah, and if we use AI for "counterintelligence missions", for instance against <put here an organization/group that current administration does not like> this is also OK, even if this happens in USA.
by eesmith | 2026-02-27 09:11:43+00:00
No need to emphasize "government" -- It's an inevitable consequence of schools.

Private secular schools have fights about what gets taught.

Private religious schools have fights about what gets taught.

Children have more rights in public schools than they have in private schools. Tinker v. Des Moines: "It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate."
by wasmitnetzen | 2026-02-27 09:12:08+00:00
Life, uuuuh, finds a way.

This ignores that the forces of capitalism, the labor market, value, etc are all made up. They work because people (are made to) believe in them. As soon as people stop believing in them, everything will fall apart. The whole point of an economy is to care for people. It will adapt to continue doing that. Yes, the changeover period might be extremely painful for a lot of people.
by bell-cot | 2026-02-27 09:12:19+00:00
> I don't even think most editors would know the difference.

We're talking about Ars Technica, not USA Today. Kinda like MotorTrend editors should know what a Z-rated tire is.

And I assume you've heard about the their AI fabrication scandal? - https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-retractio...

Not a great look, if Ars either doesn't know, or can't control what they're actually publishing.
by gucci-on-fleek | 2026-02-27 09:13:18+00:00
> Why this obsession with gelatin? What am I missing?

Probably just tradition. It's pretty easy to "accidentally" make gelatin when making a broth, and intentionally making it only requires heat and bones, which are essentially pure waste. Whereas agar is a product that you have to buy in a store, and wasn't even available in the West until somewhat recently.

Of course, everybody just buys gelatin in the stores these days, and agar is almost as easy to find, but old recipes tend to be handed down for generations.
by jeroenhd | 2026-02-27 09:14:39+00:00
An interesting attempt, Claude. However, your promot is missing an important step to measure effectiveness against humans: wait 40-60 years for your vision to degrade naturally, and check the confusables again, preferably on a small phone screen. Bonus points if you can find someone with visual disabilities from birth. Obviously most attacks aren't pixel-perfect, but that's not the point, all you need to confuse are human eyes.

Things like the Fraktur characters are obvious mismatches in any font I know, I do do wonder why they're on the list.
by ben_w | 2026-02-27 09:15:01+00:00
Shape national conversations*, sure.

A way to get data for xAI? Eh, I guess. But it's a source of bad data. Most social media is, even the best case is stuff like Stack Overflow. It wouldn't surprise me if this was at least a strong component of why Grok called itself "Mecha Hitler".

Huge success? Unfortunately I have to agree, given the US government still ended up integrating it despite the Mecha Hitler incident.

> I use grok to find out about stuff on X and it’s very effective.

As with all of these things, I have to ask: How confident are you that it's telling you true things, rather than just true-sounding things? My expectation is Grok will be overtraining on benchmarks (even relative to the others, who will also be doing so at least a bit), and Grok's benchmarks will include twitter reactions, and it will be Goodhart's-law-ing itself in the process to maximally effective rhetoric rather than maximally effective (even by the standards of other LLMs) "truth-seeking".

* plural, not "the", it also works in at least the UK as well as the US
by shineDaPoker | 2026-02-27 09:15:03+00:00
This is exactly the approach I took. Proxy layer that:
- Uses atomic records (fence tokens) to prevent concurrent execution
- Checks external system first before retrying (the retrieval step)
- Records result for future lookups

The atomic records part is critical - I learned the hard way that just checking a DB flag isn't enough (process can freeze between check and execute, lease expires, another process takes over, both execute).

How do you handle the case where:
1. Process acquires atomic lock
2. Calls external API successfully
3. Process freezes before releasing lock
4. Lock expires, new process acquires it
5. New process calls API again → duplicate

Do you just accept this edge case (rare but possible)? Or is there a mitigation I'm missing?
by piokoch | 2026-02-27 09:15:46+00:00
Well, maybe people stop changing their smartphone every two years. Or every year. Imagine the positive impact on the environment!

I am always surprised that when the planet caring, liberal Apple boss shows up on the Big Apple Event stage, he encourages people to ruin the planet by needles purchase of the new hardware, even though the old one can do the same job easily, as now the improvements are barely incremental, if any.
by throwaway5Am1k | 2026-02-27 09:16:45+00:00
>Electricity, cheap computing, calculators, photography, the internet, the steam engine, the printing press, tv, cars, gps, bicycles...

All of those were invented pre-1980. To misquote Thiel, if you remove TVs/phones from a house, you would think we're living in the 1970s
Built a Hacker News Client for Terminal
by shivkmojha | 2026-02-27 09:16:49+00:00
try out now -

- npm install -g hnclient

github - https://github.com/shivkumarojha/hnclient

it have -
> local, global search
> shortcuts vim style
> open news with enter
> shift + Enter for open it on hacker news
try out now.