MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
HN is an echo chamber of AI wrappers. Moving to Slashdot
by mekod | 2026-02-17 07:53:16+00:00
Move fast and break things" is a lie now. This place has been softened by corporate bureaucracy. Every "Show HN" I see is either a hollow AI wrapper or an "OS" that’s just three agents talking to each other. It’s performative and empty.

I am a sociologist. I was never your "coding guy," yet I build. I’ve never taken your language wars seriously—low level, high level, Javascript—it doesn't matter. Since AI arrived, I’ve been open about being "lazy" with manual coding, but I never stopped generating ideas. I thought this platform valued original thought, but it only cares about corporate-safe jargon and intellectual posturing.

I’m not here to "karma whore" or talk in circles just to get your upvotes. I’d rather go to the X crowd, where I can gain real users and build real chaos.

I’m moving to Slashdot. I hope you find your original spirit again, but until then, enjoy your polite, sterilized echo chamber. I’m out.

Peace.
by elil17 | 2026-02-17 07:53:58+00:00
Well I don't think there's anything dangerous about artificial or natural dyes. I certainly don't think you should have to put a warning label saying "dyes extracted with gasoline" on products using natural dyes.

At the same time, you shouldn't be able to lie to consumers (even if what those consumers care about is wrong and dumb)! You shouldn't be able to label with "This milk from cows not treated with rBST" if you did in fact treat the cows with rBST, even though rBST is not a health risk. Likewise, you shouldn't be able to say "my product is completely natural" when it is in fact produced through chemical synthesis.
by snowchaser | 2026-02-17 07:53:58+00:00
I noticed that the “Net Cash” figures look fishy, it seems like you’re not taking into account Marketable Securities (MS) in the calculation. These are essentially cash. See GOOG and others. (GOOG ended 2025 with almost $100B in MS, for a total of ~$132B Cash & MS)

If “Net Cash” refers to Net Cash Flow, they gained a Net $7B YoY.

Just want to understand how you are calculating these.

Cool design BTW.
by sicher | 2026-02-17 07:55:16+00:00
I'm in the same camp. The last few months I've been building a couple of applications (editors) for my own work - and since it's so fast I've had Claude spin off to build Zig tools and libraries for markdown parsing, PDF generation, a Scheme implementation for embedding and more. (If anyone's interested they are at my Codeberg: https://codeberg.org/sicher)
by cush | 2026-02-17 07:56:56+00:00
> html could probably be already used for this purpose

You’re right, and it already is, and tools like playwright MCP can easily parse a webpage to use it and get things done with existing markup today.

> BUT html is often littered with elements used for visual structure rather than semantics.

This actually doesn’t make much of a difference to a tool like playwright because it uses a snapshot of the accessibility tree, which only looks at semantic markup, ignoring any presentation

> In such a world agents wouldn’t really need a dedicated protocol

They still do though, because they can work more better when given specific tools. WebMCP could provide tools not available on the page. Like an agent hits the dominoes.com landing page. The page could provide an order_pizza tool that the agent could interact with, saving a bunch of navigation, clicks and scrolling and whatnot. It calls the order_pizza tool with “Two large pepperoni pizzas for John at <address>”, and the whole process is done.
by Joker_vD | 2026-02-17 07:57:19+00:00
That it doesn't pleases lots of its users I imagine. I, personally, certainly never enjoyed it but sometimes you don't have a realistic alternative and have to use C++ (or C). In which case your pleasure or displeasure doesn't really matter, you just use that one tool with very sharp edges in the most unexpected (and ridiculously exposed) places with as much care as you could, then bandage your wounds and move on.
by whatever1 | 2026-02-17 07:58:28+00:00
Racism shortage is a myth.

Is the h1b a good system? No.

Do the people who suddenly started bringing it up once Trump got elected give a single f about policy? Also no.

Don’t waste your time discussing policy with them. They don’t care.

Because at the core, they only care about the color of the skin of the tech workers.
by properbrew | 2026-02-17 07:59:28+00:00
If you're looking for free STT you can use Whistle across Windows/Mac/Linux and Android (iOS released soon)

https://blazingbanana.com/work/whistle

Pro version will be released soon that uses local LLM for overview inference as well (or your ChatGPT sub with Codex) - https://postimg.cc/YGCCLNgn
by w0de0 | 2026-02-17 08:00:10+00:00
> Not a Hater

Nor am I, but…

> Earlier today I was asking Gemini to find me a nearby bar that would optimize for price, tastiness of drinks, and “not making me feel lonely as a solo traveler on Valentine’s day.”

…this sort of behavior I don’t believe I understand. It seems a silly abdication of living one’s own life. Here’s a poem from just me.

Choose a bar, ye human.

Confront your loneliness.
if you must. Or flee.
Wander a bit.
Do a bar crawl.
Take up smoking.
Get wasted; be buzzed; abstain; wander, do a bit;
fail to optimize - for at least one opalescent moment - if not,
goddamn, why be?
by yuppiepuppie | 2026-02-17 08:00:16+00:00
Ive had 2 posts take off (>300 points) in the past 2 months. One was a project that garnered a bunch of points initially (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46793693).

The other was more interesting. It was a "rise from the dead" post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46466027), meaning I posted it on Jan 2, and then on Jan 5 I started to get emails from readers giving me feedback about the post. I had not expected that level of response...

From this experience, I learned nothing about how either the algorithm works or when the best time post is. IMO just being part of the community and showing your work frequently is the best strategy here.

Launch early, launch often - or something like that.
by nomilk | 2026-02-17 08:00:53+00:00
FWIW, I've made comments on here and other social media that got high scores that later turned out to be wrong, and comments on here and other social media that got low scores (many downvotes), which later turned out to be correct (and provably/objectively/unambiguously so).

Popularity doesn't mean much, if anything. Don't worry about 'internet points'. Just chat and exchange ideas.

(note: I've heard some folks use extensions or tamper monkey scripts to remove visibility of likes/upvotes/downvotes, so they aren't unduly influenced by 'internet points', enabling them to focus solely on discourse).
by sureglymop | 2026-02-17 08:01:41+00:00
Here's an interesting thing. I decided to do advent of code in assembly last year. What I noticed is that there must be a lot of code and binaries in AI training data but not a lot of intermediate representation. Be it LLVM IR, assembly or other forms of IR, it seems underrepresented. LLMs kept trying to give me code patterns that would make sense for high level code but not really for assembly because by hand one could find much more optimized solutions there.

But coincidentally this seems like an easy win for generated training data. Take all your code and have a compiler spit out assembly as well as binary. Now your LLM will not only be able to be a compiler but also make that useful and understandable by humans.
by fuzzfactor | 2026-02-17 08:01:54+00:00
Rufus has actually become the standard for reliably making the most effective USB sticks for installing Windows. For quite some time now.

The most gifted engineers in various parts of the Microsoft organization have been using it themselves and recommending it more & more.

Rufus handles so many different kinds of ISO, it's well-established for years that if a download fails to make the ideal USB, there's something wrong with the USB device or the file, not anything wrong with Rufus.
by tibbar | 2026-02-17 08:02:00+00:00
I think this statement is on the same level as "a human cannot explain why they gave the answer they gave because they cannot actually introspect the chemical reactions in their brain." That is true, but a human often has an internal train of thought that preceded their ultimate answer, and it is interesting to know what that train of thought was.

In the same way, it is often quite instructive to know what the reasoning trace was that preceded an LLM's answer, without having to worry about what, mechanically, the LLM "understood" about the tokens, if this is even a meaningful question.
by rmunn | 2026-02-17 08:02:06+00:00
Software developers don't have to be cargo-culty... if they're working on systems that are well-documented or are open-source (or at least source-available) so that you can actually dig in to find out how the system works.

But with LLMs, the internals are not well-documented, most are not open-source (and even if the model and weights are open-source, it's impossible for a human to read a grid of numbers and understand exactly how it will change its output for a given input), and there's also an element of randomness inherent to how the LLM behaves.

Given that fact, it's not surprising to find that developers trying to use LLMs end up adding certain inputs out of what amounts to superstition ("it seems to work better when I tell it to think before coding, so let's add that instruction and hopefully it'll help avoid bad code" but there's very little way to be sure that it did anything). It honestly reminds me of gambling fallacies, e.g. tabletop RPG players who have their "lucky" die that they bring out for important rolls. There's insufficient input to be sure that this line, which you add to all your prompts by putting it in AGENTS.md, is doing anything — but it makes you feel better to have it in there.

(None of which is intended as a criticism, BTW: that's just what you have to do when using an opaque, partly-random tool).
by brigandish | 2026-02-17 08:02:38+00:00
That's the outcome of cherry picking the good things and ignoring the bad, not their decision making structure. Try asking critics of the EU what they don't like (a quick search on here will provide plenty of examples) and you'll see laws that are not good for ordinary people. Repeat with any jurisdiction, making sure to choose the opposite of your preconception (e.g. ask proponents of the USA's system what they like about it) and you'll get a better, less biased and more challenging view.
by cadamsdotcom | 2026-02-17 08:02:51+00:00
Rather than let results be random, iteratively and continuously add more and more guardrails and grounding.

Tests, linting, guidance in response to key events (Claude Code hooks are great for this), automatically passing the agent’s code plan to another model invocation then passing back whatever feedback that model has on the plan so you don’t have to point out the same flaws in plans over and over.. custom scripts that iterate your codebase for antipatterns (they can walk the AST or be regex based - ask your agent to write them!)

Codify everything you’re looping back to your agent about and make it a guardrail. Give your agent the tools it needs to give itself grounding.

An agent without guardrails or grounding is like a person unconnected to their senses: disconnected from the world, all you do is dream - in a dream anything can happen, there’s nothing to ensure realism. When you look at it that way it’s a miracle coding agents produce anything useful at all :)
by materielle | 2026-02-17 08:03:35+00:00
It’s sort of surprising how naive developers still are given the countless rug pulls over the past decade or two.

You’re right on the money: the important thing to look at are the incentive structures.

Basically all tech companies from the post-great financial crisis expansion (Google, post Balmer Microsoft, Twitter, Instagram, Airbnb, Uber, etc) started off user-friendly but all eventually converged towards their investment incentive structure.

One big exception is Wikipedia. Not surprising since it has a completely different funding model!

I’m sure Anthropic is super user friendly now, while they are focused on expansion and founding devs still have concentrated policial sway. It will eventually converge on its incentive structures to extract profit for shareholders like all other companies.
by commandersaki | 2026-02-17 08:03:39+00:00
They did find a pretty gaping vulnerability for 1Password but Agile Bits (the creator of 1P) already knew about it.

It's called a vault substitution attack, and it allows a malicious server to replace contents of a shared vault but also learn of any new items entered into that shared vault. The fix is pretty trivial from a cryptography perspective but it would require probably significant change in 1P applications and architecture/protocols.
by verdverm | 2026-02-17 08:03:45+00:00
I'm not generally opposed to the idea, I'm just looking at the output and seeing tokens burnt to produce slop projects. I'd imagine a bunch of basic, non-coding tasks may be more tractable, but a quick look at /shownew ought to reduce anxiety

My personal approach is to start from minimal, push that as far as I can, keep the human in the loop so I know how good it actually is, then find ways that have a better overall ROI. I'm performing similar loops to clawd/ralph manually, with my attention paid.
by vintermann | 2026-02-17 08:06:44+00:00
Identity isn't a scientific question, science can't tell you who you are. Collectivist ideologies throughout history have encouraged people to think of themselves as - or rather maybe, be subsumed in an identity outside their body. And it might be wrong in a moral sense, but in a scientific sense it's neither right or wrong. Of course there's complex interaction and information exchange going on inside a state or a "race", and it's not clear why that shouldn't make collective "intelligent" in the same way we argue an individual human is intelligent. Philosophies which derive identity/value from intelligence (I don't agree with those philosophies) have very little to answer to collectivist ideologies which reject humanism.
by mustaphah | 2026-02-17 08:07:34+00:00
What if the most interesting finding ends up buried under a vague title? Aside from the "self-generated skills" aspect, there isn't much there that meaningfully warrants deeper discussion.

I chose a title that directly reflects an interesting finding - something that offers substantial insight to the community. I think the rule should be applied with some nuance; in this case, being explicit is a net positive.

I have no interest in linkbait, and I hope that's evident from my previous submissions
by gspetr | 2026-02-17 08:08:48+00:00
"They lost a large chunk of land"

I've asked Gemini. Interestingly, they were offered over 2x as much territory in exchange for 1.5% of their land. Curiously, Wikipedia doesn't mention that in the Winter War article.

They lost 10-11% after WW2. Which deal was better?

"every male still needs to spend one year of their life"

Not 1 year. Gemini says it's 6-12 months, and several European countries not bordering the big bad fit that criteria.

Who exactly is after Austria, which has conscription, but has been neutral since basically the entire cold war?

Or the famously neutral Switzerland?

"No, it hasn’t."

Top Export Partners (2019)

The total value of Finnish goods exports in 2019 was approximately $72.84 billion.

1. Germany: $10.44 billion (14.33% share)

2. Sweden: $7.47 billion (10.26% share)

3. United States: $5.20 billion (7.14% share)

4. Netherlands: $4.34 billion (5.95% share)

5. Russia: $4.02 billion (5.51% share)

6. China: $3.84 billion (5.28% share)

Top Import Partners (2019)

1. Germany: $11.42 billion (15.49% share)

2. Russia: $10.01 billion (13.57% share)

3. Sweden: $8.16 billion (11.06% share)

4. China: $5.49 billion (7.45% share)

5. Netherlands: $3.29 billion (4.46% share)

6. United States: $2.48 billion (3.37% share)

Nominal GDP per Capita in 2019 (2019 US dollars):

United States: $65,281

Finland: $48,629

Germany: $46,793

Yep, didn't work out well at all.
by AxiomLab | 2026-02-17 08:10:30+00:00
Spot on. The theory of optical balance is well-documented in traditional typography.

The bottleneck I'm tackling isn't the design theory itself, but the computational translation of it: how to convert that human visual intuition into a deterministic set of math rules for dynamic generation.

If you know of any resources that specifically bridge type design heuristics with programmatic geometry, I'd love to check them out.
by rocqua | 2026-02-17 08:10:41+00:00
If you want to be pedantic about it you could phrase it as follows.

When the LLM was in reasoning mode, in the reasoning context it often expressed statement X. Given that, and the relevance of statement X to the taken action. It seems likely that the presence of statement X in the context contributed to this action. Besides, the presence of statement X in the reasoning likely means that given the previous context embeddings of X are close to the context.

Hence we think that the action was taken due to statement X.

And that output could have come from an LLM introspecting it's own reasoning.

I don't think that phrasing things so pedanticaly is worth the extra precision though. Especially not for the statement that inspecting the reasoning logs of sn LLM can help give insight on why an LLM acted a certain way.
by drewnick | 2026-02-17 08:10:51+00:00
I've gotten sucked into 1950s/60s/70s Pan Am (the defacto U.S. flag carrier of the era) advertising videos and the concept is similar to AT&T: premium service, basically a monopoly.

Problem is: prices were REALLY high.

Competition worked out in Part 121 airlines and telco, in the long run.
Defensive Publication: A $0 Alternative to Patents for Bootstrapped SaaS
by patentailab | 2026-02-17 08:10:54+00:00
I see many founders spending $20k+ on patents too early. I wanted to share a cheaper engineering-focused strategy called "Defensive Publication" (using GitHub + Wayback Machine to establish Prior Art under 35 U.S.C. 102).

I wrote a detailed breakdown on how to structure the "Enabling Disclosure" so it actually holds up in court:
https://patentailab.com/defensive-publication-strategy/

Has anyone here successfully used defensive publication to block a patent troll?
by js8 | 2026-02-17 08:11:02+00:00
Because you're judging how does an AI art piece speaks to you as a human, while I am defining AI art in a more abstract sense as a form of communication between two beings.

Take e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_Altamira paintings or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_figurine. These things are probably not aesthetic to you either - as they're not to me. But it speaks to people who did it, and in that sense it's art, and it is profound. (And I would say modern AI is actually more relatable to us than humans 10k years ago.)
by roenxi | 2026-02-17 08:11:03+00:00
It is also worth noting that US management is notoriously bad at the actual management. Toyota v. US car manufacturers did not look like a fair fight when Deming was in the ascendant, and it is hard to tell given the scales involved but it looks a lot like the US has been outmanoeuvred in all aspects of industry by the Asians.

US companies are generally a better bet though, because despite the handicap of being run by Americans, they are hosted in a country that generally believes in freedom and rule of law which means they have an unfair advantage even if they do a sub-par job of making the most of what they have.

Exceptions abound in the details.
by andai | 2026-02-17 08:11:41+00:00
I wanted to test my theory that "don't use cliche'd language" helps with that, but incredibly the essays ChatGPT is giving me today don't have any of the tells. How do I get it to give me slop?

I asked "Can you give me a short essay on the history of fire." Maybe the type of writing requested has a massive effect on the language used?
by friendzis | 2026-02-17 08:11:44+00:00
Not necessarily limited "intellect", but rather limited background knowledge.

Deming requires quite a bit of knowledge and understanding in failure/success modes. The core tenet of Deming is that every output is a result of some process and, therefore, output is controlled by controlling* the process itself. Look at your process and tackle failure modes in this priority list.

Drucker, on the other hand, puts the process under the fog of war and basically says deploy pressure on process outputs and let the process adjust itself. It requires much less understanding behind the processes to make sense.

* - Process control in Deming is mostly about variability.
by somat | 2026-02-17 08:12:08+00:00
Apologies for the flippant one liner, You made a good point and deserve more than that.

On the one hand, having the optimizer save you from your own bad code is a huge draw, this is my desperate hope with SQL, I can write garbage queries and the optimizer will save me from myself.

But... Someone put that code there, spent time and effort to get that machinery into place with the expectation that it is doing something. and when the optimizer takes that away with no hint. That does not feel right either. Especially when the program now behaves differently when "optimized" vs unoptimized.
by verdverm | 2026-02-17 08:12:21+00:00
> Every "Show HN" I see is either a hollow AI wrapper or an "OS" that’s just three agents talking to each other. It’s performative and empty.

I feel ya on this one and have been in /new trying to help, but yours is a comment which also breaks one of the rules:

"Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."
by rmunn | 2026-02-17 08:12:51+00:00
If I understand the paper correctly, the researchers found that AGENTS.md context files caused the LLMs to burn through more tokens as they parsed and followed the instructions, but they did not find a large change in the success rate (defined by "the PR passes the existing unit tests in the repo").

What wasn't measured, probably because it's almost impossible to quantify, was the quality of the code produced. Did the context files help the LLMs produce code that matched the style of the rest of the project? Did the code produced end up reasonably maintainable in the long run, or was it slop that increased long-term tech debt? These are important questions, but as they are extremely difficult to assign numbers to and measure in an automated way, the paper didn't attempt to answer them.
by pjmlp | 2026-02-17 08:14:16+00:00
I have seen CMS systems and asset management products, whose translation and designer teams are now mostly gone, thanks to AI taking care of their work.

How many translation jobs, or asset creation jobs are still available?

I also have witness backend teams being reduced, thanks to SaaS and iPaaS cloud products that remove the need of backend development, now one only needs to plug a couple of products, do some AI based integrations in Boomi, Workato, n8n,... create a frontend with Vercel's v0 and be done with it.

I am in no ilusion that it will come for me as well, and better slide into some other alternative skill set, at least I am closer to retirement, than hunting for my first job.
Show HN: I made an affiliate site that tracks sales with coupons, not cookies
by jakemanger | 2026-02-17 08:14:23+00:00
I run a few sites and use affiliates to help grow them.

Used rewardful before, but most people blocked cookies, then affiliates never got credited, then they stopped promoting.

Then I switched to Paddle and rewardful didn't even support it anymore.

So I built this. Uses coupon codes instead of cookies. Doesn't need any code changes to your site to start.

Connects to Stripe and Paddle in 15 seconds.

Optional one-line snippet for auto-apply links (no cookie banner). They're GDPR compliant by default.

It's also waffle themed... so you can become a "waffiliate"