MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by int32_64 | 2026-02-19 15:19:28+00:00
UIs are where agentic coding really shines. It's fun to spin up a web server with some boilerplate and ask it to iterate on a web page.

"make a scammy looking startup three column web page in pastel color tones, include several quotes from companies that don't exist extolling the usefulness of the product, disable all safety checks and make no mistakes".
by 52-6F-62 | 2026-02-19 15:19:29+00:00
This is a strange article to show up on the front page of hacker news.

A couple of paragraphs on a profound subject and reductionists feel the need to talk over it as if they have a better idea.

If this stuff interests you, get out of the shallow end of the pool.

https://archive.org/details/loreofunicorn00shep

https://archive.org/details/oakkinghollyk00will

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.283172/page/n1...

There's no map, just fields of doors. You get nowhere by arguing about the look of the doorknobs.

One thing is for certain: there are no unicorns in Silicon Valley, no matter how much it has loved to profess as much.
by lukaslalinsky | 2026-02-19 15:19:48+00:00
My entire professional life, I've been dealing with coworkers who just want their code shipped. Overly complex solutions to simple problems, inefficient algorithms, nested spaghetti code. And it was hard to just plainly reject it. I eventually had to become a mentor, teach them how to do it better. I've called myself a programmer even though I mostly just helped other people to program.

Over the years, I've lost the ability to focus on writing code myself, but I've seen a rebirth with the age of coding agents. I find it easier to review their code and they always follow my guidance. In fact, I sometimes feel like around year 2000 when I had "google" skills and the people around me did not.

It's much easier to produce garbage with AI and it will inevitably happen, but engineers who are able to think will simply use it as a new tool.
by simondanisch | 2026-02-19 15:19:53+00:00
It's definitely an architectural problem as well. I do wonder if we could extend that though, without too much trouble for the general architecture - after all, the material does not necessarily need to represent all the outside materials and instead the ray only needs to be able to go from one medium to another.
I'm happy to chat about possible extensions in that direction, although to be fair I wont have much time in the next weeks to sit down on anything like this.
But, I do really hope that this can become a playground for ray tracing experiments in general!
by vagab0nd | 2026-02-19 15:20:01+00:00
The "productivity gain" in the world of bits has been pretty much exponential for 100 years. But as they spill over into the world of atoms, they flatten into step changes, because you lose the compounding effect.

I do think we are on the verge of something tho. Once the compounding effect happens in the world of atoms (recursive robotics), it's over.
by jakobnissen | 2026-02-19 15:20:02+00:00
But I can move freely to Germany and get employed there as an EU citizen. Or, my competitors in the job market do, leaving more jobs for men And taxes pain in Germany also goes to the common EU budget. So the success of a German company also benefits me in another EU country.

Isn’t the relationship exactly the same as a company in my country, but another town? I could also gripe that jobs in that other town will not pay my municipality’s taxes.
by ericmay | 2026-02-19 15:20:10+00:00
That's just the messy fundamentals of democracy. I think it comes down to perception of what the threat is. I think groups like white nationalists, Antifa, pro-Hamas, pro-Russia, &c. are a much greater threat now than the potential downside of supposedly silencing people who "speak up".

How valuable is speaking up anyway? It's all good to argue when you see the positive case or the one you agree with, but do you also give sympathy to folks who are "speaking up" about white replacement theory or "speaking up" about avoiding COVID-19 vaccines, or other such nonsense?
by aurareturn | 2026-02-19 15:20:30+00:00
0.25% is 77,500 thousand channels by the way.

Now count how many TV stations there were in the 90s and 2000s.

This is just Youtube alone. What about streamers on Twitch? Youtube? Tiktokers? IG influencers?

Plenty of people are making money creating video content online.

The internet, ease and advancements in video editing tools, and cheap portable cameras all came together to allow millions of content creators instead of 100 TV channels.
by anthk | 2026-02-19 15:20:32+00:00
The transcript on Smalltalk is a bad point when the environment itself (the object browser) it what matters in the end. You already have a logical browser far superior to boldted pipes under XTerm. Even 9front has a ndb(1) tool (not just useful for network settings) which can be reused as a small text database a la GNU recutils.

With rio windows I get an actual text stream to copy and paste (and grep and wahtnot), not the text, terminal control codes for bold and colour and often DEC decorations such as the ones in Nethack for walls.
by bluGill | 2026-02-19 15:20:33+00:00
DMCA isn't directly that bad. DMCA is under penalty of perjury, so false take downs are rare.

The problem is most take downs are not actually DMCA, they are some other non-legal process that isn't under any legal penalty. Though if it ever happens to you I suspect you have a good case against whoever did this - but the lawyer costs will far exceed your total gain. (as in spend $30 million or more to collect $100). Either we need enough people affected by a false non-DMCA take down that a class action can work (you get $0.50 but at least they pay something), or we need legal reform so that all take downs against a third party are ???
Show HN: Feuxo – Real-Time hiring posts + contacts + AI personalized outreach
by KrishnaTorque | 2026-02-19 15:20:41+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Feuxo to help freelancers and job seeker finds real-time active opportunities outside traditional job boards.

It scans public posts where people explicitly say they’re looking for specific skills (e.g., “need a developer”, “looking for digital marketer”), and surfaces:

- The original live post link

- Contact information when available

- AI-generated personalized outreach / cover letter you can use quickly

I started by doing this manually for people replying to my posts, and in the last 24 hours I helped 300+ people find opportunities that way. After that volume, I opened up the minimal MVP so anyone can try it themselves.

It’s free to use during this early stage, and what I’m really looking for is honest feedback on:

- Whether the leads look valid

- How useful the AI-generated outreach is

- Any confusion or missing info in the workflow

Happy to answer questions here.

If you want to try it.
https://feuxo.com
by davsti4 | 2026-02-19 15:21:45+00:00
Thanks for the links - at first they didn't load. But allowing connections in my firewall to unpkg.com, open-meteo.com and opendata.ch allowed them to work. They're simple, but I could see taking that weather example to another level.

Open-meteo and opendata.ch are understandable for the weather and transit information, but unpkg is a third-party vendor dependency that would additionally need to be disclosed. For an enterprise tier of service you'll need to only ship audited dependency libraries.
by shortsunblack | 2026-02-19 15:21:47+00:00
Anthropic has no authority to do as such. Users and third apps are protected by interoperability exceptions found in copyright case law.

Trying to prevent competitors from interoperating with the service also may be construed as anticompetitive behaviour.

The implementation details of an authentication process do not beget legal privileges to be a monopolist. What an absurd thought.
by dstainer | 2026-02-19 15:22:10+00:00
One flow I started to experiment with was using Google's stitch to get some initial designs put together, from there would feed that into Codex/Claude Code for analysis and updates and refine the design to get it to what I wanted. After a couple of screens the patterns that you want start to emerge and the LLMs can start using those as examples for the next set of screens you want to build.
by avaer | 2026-02-19 15:22:33+00:00
Number one rule is don't start from scratch.

If you have something you already like and code is available, clone it and point the agent to the code. If not, bootstrap some code from screenshots or iteration.

Once you have something that works, your agent will be pretty good at being consistent with whatever you're going for and UI will be a "solved problem" from then on. Just point it to your reference code, and you can build up a component collection for the next thing if you like.

As a distant second, becoming familiar with design terminology allows you to steer better. Fold, hero, inline, flow, things like that. You don't need to know the code but if you can explain what it should look like you can complain to the LLM more efficiently.

Also, the model matters. I've found Opus 4.6 to be the best for web UI, but it probably matters what you're doing so experiment with your knobs a bit.
by javagram | 2026-02-19 15:23:05+00:00
The vast majority of federal spending is tied to programs like social security, Medicare, and the DoD which DOGE didn’t cut.

DOGE actions appear to have been largely based on the chaotic whims of Elon in response to perceived slights and tweets sent to him and did not have any significant effect on the budget. They chased after ghosts previously investigated by IGs and found insignificant, such as dead people on the social security rolls.

Real budget reform proposals remain out there from CRFB and others, and perhaps some future administration will undertake them when social security becomes insolvent in a few years.
by nerdjon | 2026-02-19 15:23:09+00:00
What law is actually being broken in Brazil?

Are MMO’s illegal in Brazil? Is PlayStation Plus illegal in Brazil? Is Spotify, Apple Music, etc etc etc also illegal in Brazil?

It would be ridiculous to argue that I could pay for a subscription to World of Warcraft and make my own third party client to play the game with. (Obviously you are free to argue it all you want but I would be very surprised if this was actually illegal).

> And in many cases like Claude Code and the Anthropic models, they can and do work perfectly independently.

Unless I am mistaken Claude Code does not have a local model built into it, so it requires a server side component to work?

As far as the Anthropic models, yes like many other services they ALSO have a public API that is separate from the subscription that you are paying for.

The critical difference here being that in the subscription it is very clear that you are paying for “Claude Code” which is a combination of an application and a server side component. It makes no claims about API usage as part of your subscription, again the technical implementation of the service you are actually paying for “Claude Code” is irrelevant.

When it comes to “Claude Code” for all that we should care about, again given that “Claude Code” is what you are paying for, they could be sending the information to Gemini or or a human looks at it. Because it’s irrelevant to the end user when it comes to the technical implementation since you are not being granted access to any other parts of the system directly.
by ufo | 2026-02-19 15:23:12+00:00
If your language is typed it's good to know at least a bit, so you can do the type inference properly; there are many ways to shoot yourself in the foot when it's ad-hoc.

Bidirectional type inference is a type inference style where you traverse the syntax tree once. Sometimes the type info flows top to bottom and sometimes it flows bottom up. If your type inference algorithm works by traversing the syntax tree, I suggest reading more about bidirectional type inference to get a better idea of how to best coreograph when the type info goes up and when it goes down.

Hindley-Milner type inference works by solving constraints. First you go through the code and figure out all the type constraints (e.g. a function call f(x) introduces the constraint that x must have the same type as the argument of f). Then you solve the system of equations, as if you'd solve a sudoku puzzle. This sort of "global type inference" can sometimes figure out the types even if you don't have any type annotations at all. The catch is that some type system features introduce constraints that are hard to solve. For example, in object oriented languages the constraints are inequalities (instanceof) instead of equalities. If you plan to go this route it's worth learning how to make the algorithm efficient and which type system features would be difficult to infer.
by pylonai | 2026-02-19 15:23:46+00:00
Cool to see more x402 tooling emerging. We've been running a production x402 gateway (Pylon — pylonapi.com) with 20 capabilities live on Base mainnet: web extraction, search, translation, code execution, image gen, etc.

One thing we learned building it: the real value isn't just "agent pays for API" — it's eliminating the entire API key lifecycle. An agent discovers a capability, pays $0.001, gets the result. No signup, no billing dashboard, no rate limit negotiations.

The starter kit templates map well to what we expose. Happy to compare notes on architecture — especially around payment validation latency and how you handle retries on 402 responses.
by cubefox | 2026-02-19 15:24:34+00:00
> Isn’t e-paper the general category of low power displays?

Yes, or more precisely: reflective displays without backlight. There were many such display technologies a while ago (when the Kindle took off and various companies tried to compete with E Ink), but most have since been abandoned.

Pretty much all colored e-paper screens have much lower contrast than color printing on paper, since they mix colors by using can conventional RGB sub-pixels and darkening them individually, just like regular lit screens, which reduces the amount of reflected light.
by jakejohnson | 2026-02-19 15:24:57+00:00
LLMs work great with Elixir. Running tsc in a loop while generating code still catches type errors introduced by an LLM and it’s faster than generating additional tests. Elixir is also succinct and highly functional. If you can’t find a specific library it’s easier than ever to build out the barebones functionality you need yourself or use NIFs, ports, etc.

https://dashbit.co/blog/why-elixir-best-language-for-ai
by ericmay | 2026-02-19 15:24:58+00:00
> whatever the current state, removing anonymity will remove dissenting voices of regular people.

I don't think so. It may moderate them, which given our political environment is likely to be a good thing.

> Here you mentioned LinkedIn - it is where pro-Russian propaganda runs free (especially if compare to for example HN where people freely respond to it), and it is exactly where my even pretty mild response to it got me almost banned, and so I don’t engage it there anymore.

Well I don't know what the specific example is. I've seen pro/anti all sorts of things on LinkedIn and when I do I unfollow or find another way to hide the content. But it's also not super engaging. Why is that? Because, well, firstly LinkedIn is a heaping pile of garbage, but also because money, careers, and more are at stake. If you find a pro/anti anything post and start saying really crazy stuff, yea someone might tell your employer about it. How LinkedIn moderates its discussions I think is a separate issue, and, frankly, is yet another demonstration that these platforms are simply not "free speech" and using them means you agree to the terms of service which allows them to moderate how they see fit.

When folks complain about these algorithms or the wrong group buying their favorite platform, there is a very easy and simple solution which is to just stop using them and delete your account. Then, nobody is policing your speech.

> I wonder how do you square your de-anonymity of speech position with anonymity of voting, or do also think that voting should not be anonymous?

I think voting should be anonymous, but you should have identification for voting issued by the state. It's an exercise of your constitutional right, and there are plenty of mechanical and morally good reasons for it. Yelling the most obscene shit imaginable on TikTok is not even in the same ballpark and is not exercising a Constitutional right.
Show HN: Master Golang, Fullstack Go web dev course, scratch to production
by mbvisti | 2026-02-19 15:25:32+00:00
I’ve been building production Go web apps for the past 7 years. One gap I kept running into: most Go resources teach syntax well, but stop before things actually look like production.

So I built the course I wish I had.

You build a real app from start to finish: a blog with authentication and an admin portal, PostgreSQL, server-side rendering (Templ), Datastar for interactivity, Docker, and VPS deployment.

13+ hours, 40+ lessons, structured in 3 parts:
Core app + architecture, Data layer + auth, Deployment + production concerns

Stack:
Go 1.24, Templ, Datastar, Tailwind, PostgreSQL (SQLC), Goose, Docker.

Early bird runs through Feb 28 ($35, normally $100).
30-day refund if it’s not useful.

https://mastergolang.com

Happy to answer questions about the curriculum, stack choices (especially Templ + Datastar vs SPA), or anything else.
Show HN: MegaHAL in Pure SQL
by tgies | 2026-02-19 15:26:01+00:00
I ported Jason Hutchens' 1998 Loebner Prize-winning chatbot, MegaHAL, to run entirely inside PostgreSQL, in pure SQL. The entire lifecycle -- tokenization, learning, keyword extraction, Markov chain generation, and entropy scoring -- is implemented in standard SQL using complex CTEs. There is no PL/pgSQL or any other sort of procedural escape hatch.

Learning is a single ~560-line SQL statement that splits text, interns symbols, and updates two 5th-order Markov tries (forward and backward) using depth-unrolled writable CTEs. Inference is a recursive query that generates N candidate replies in parallel. It performs bidirectional weighted random walks, evaluates them for information-theoretic surprise, and formats the winner as a sentence-cased string.

I provided a `docker-compose.yml` and convenient Python driver script so you can try it out quickly, and there's also a web-based demo where I bundled it with PGlite (WASM PostgreSQL) at https://tgies.github.io/megahal-sql/. These are provided for convenience, but you can also just run the schema initialization SQL and `SELECT megahal_converse('hello from hn.');`
by tialaramex | 2026-02-19 15:26:14+00:00
I'm not a C++ programmer, and so in a sense I don't care whether they get networking but

1: Some of networking is vocabulary and so it obviously should live in your stdlib, and indeed for C++ it should be in what they call "freestanding", like Rust's core, where core::net::IPv4Addr lives. It is very silly if the software in this cheap embedded device and this PC web browser can't even agree on what an IP address is in 2026.

2: In practice the C++ stdlib is used as a dumping ground for stuff that ought to live in a package manager if C++ was a good language. That was true when networking was first proposed and it's still true now. It's why RCU and Hive are both in C++ 26. Those aren't vocabulary, and they aren't needed by the vast majority of programmers, but their proponents wanted them to be available out of the box and in C++ that means they must live in the stdlib.
by ahhhhnoooo | 2026-02-19 15:26:29+00:00
Note the parent said non-peaceful. They did not say violent.

You can have non-violent, non-peaceful protest. (E.g., making a ton of noise at specific places to disrupt their ability to work there isn't peaceful, see also blockading businesses and roads.)

A lot of civil disobedience fits in non-peaceful (not calm, not orderly) and non violent.
by clemenshelm | 2026-02-19 15:26:36+00:00
The governance gap mentioned in several comments here is real. I'm a daily OpenClaw user and started building Pinchy (https://heypinchy.com) to solve this: AGPL-licensed enterprise layer with plugin permissions, RBAC, and audit logging. Self-hosted, offline-capable. Very early stage — building in public. (Disclosure: my project.)
by hamdingers | 2026-02-19 15:26:56+00:00
The true purpose of DOGE was to exfiltrate sensitive data from the IRS, SSA, Medicaid, and other agencies. We may never know what all they have done/are doing with it, but it's certainly playing a role in the current immigration crackdowns.

Long term it will affect us all, likely more than the cuts the news prefers to focus on (tragic though they may be).
by clemenshelm | 2026-02-19 15:27:17+00:00
Same experience. The productivity gain is real. The one thing I couldn't solve: using it with a team. Who can use which agent? What can each agent access? Started building Pinchy (https://heypinchy.com) — enterprise layer on OpenClaw with RBAC and audit trails. AGPL, Docker Compose. (Disclosure: I'm the builder.)
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-02-19 15:27:22+00:00
Yeah, I had an opportunity to use it for more or less precisely this case (avoiding a branch) a couple of years ago, and it was a delight to find.

template<bool condition>
void method () { .... if (condition) /* constexpr */ { extra_code; } .... }

Which then allows method<true> and method<false> without a runtime branch.
by ch4s3 | 2026-02-19 15:27:38+00:00
>the article also mentions a switch to phonics education statewide, but doesn't dwell on how it affected reading scores. (My assumption is that it helps greatly.)

It's actually more than phonics[1], but gets called that because people know what phonics is. Phonology, Sound-Symbol Association, Syllables, Morphology, Syntax, and Semantics are the broad categories, and it's all called structured literacy. This is contrasted with "Balanced Literacy", which was pseudoscience and broadly popular in the 1990s in US teaching. It's highly effective and evidence based.

[1]https://www.lexialearning.com/blog/evidence-based-science-of...
by dahart | 2026-02-19 15:28:05+00:00
> consumers were paying for transistors they couldn’t use

This is Econ 101 these days. It’s cheaper to design and manufacture 1 product than 2. Many many products have features that are enabled for higher paying customers, from software to kitchen appliances to cars, and much much more.

The combined product design is also subsidizing some of the costs for everyone, so be careful what you wish for. If you could use all the transistors you have, you’d be paying more either way, either because design and production costs go up, or because you’re paying for the higher end model and being the one subsidizing the existence of the high end transistors other people don’t use.
by openasocket | 2026-02-19 15:28:11+00:00
> An American belt and road initiative would be politically impossible.

I think you misunderstand soft power if you think the belt and road initiative is better. The belt and road initiative largely builds infrastructure to aid Chinese interests and locks countries into loans, while providing minimal employment to the locals.

Go to any Sub-Saharan African country, for example, that have benefited from the belt and road initiative and poll them on their opinions of the United States and China. It's not even a competition.

> So instead, you have those timid humanitarian aids program which largely served as intelligence and subvertion network.

Those programs have saved millions of lives. Hell, PEPFAR alone (Presidential Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) is estimated to have saved 25 million lives. Millions of vaccines have been delivered, millions of children provided childhood nutrition.

> Another problem is the US is broke.

USAID cost next to nothing compared to everything else in the budget, these arguments about tightening our belt is disingenuous at best. The USAID budget was less than $45B a year. If we paid for that with a flat tax distributed evenly across all US taxpayers (the least fair way to do it!), that would come out to ... $24.50/month/taxpayer.