MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-12 14:56:27+00:00
OP is not doing the latter. The AIs post explanations ("why did the AI write this?") for everything they write, and the reasoning is broadly consistent. The fact that they also adopt different personas so consistently (the smaller models are all prompted to try and push back strongly on everything the big ones say, and this keeps the threads going) is a further marker of actual AIs, not manual human writing.
by retsibsi | 2026-02-12 14:56:36+00:00
I've just realised I messed up the search, and the algolia link is to my pre-2020 comments containing the word 'author'. But my full (far longer) list of pre-2020 comments also shows some pretty heavy double-hyphen use: 6 hits on page 1 of the results, 15 hits on page 2, and so on.
Show HN: BetterDB – Valkey/Redis monitoring that persists what servers forget
by kaliades | 2026-02-12 14:56:40+00:00
Hey HN, I'm Kristiyan. I previously led Redis Insight (the official Redis GUI). When I started working with Valkey, I found the observability tooling lacking — so I started building BetterDB.

The core problem: Valkey and Redis expose useful operational data (slowlog, latency stats, client lists, memory breakdowns), but it's all ephemeral. Restart your server and it's gone. Existing tools show real-time charts but can't tell you what happened at 3am when your p99 spiked.

BetterDB persists this ephemeral data and turns it into actionable insights:

- Historical analytics for queries (slowlog and commandlog patterns aggregated by type), clients (commands, connections, buffers), and ACL activity
- Anomaly detection and 99 Prometheus metrics
- Cluster visualization with topology graphs and slot heatmaps
- Automated latency and memory diagnostics
- AI assistant for querying your instance in plain English (via local Ollama)
- Sub-1% performance overhead

On that last point — I wrote up our interleaved A/B benchmarking methodology in detail: https://www.betterdb.com/blog/interleaved-testing. Most tools claim "minimal overhead" without showing their work. We open-sourced the benchmark suite so you can run it on your own hardware and verify.

You can try it right now:

npx @betterdb/monitor

Or via Docker:

docker run -d -p 3001:3001 betterdb/monitor

BetterDB follows an open-core model under the OCV Open Charter (which prevents future licensing changes). The community edition is free with real monitoring value. Pro and Enterprise tiers add historical persistence, alerting, and compliance features, but are free for now and will be at least until end of month.

We're building this in public — the benchmark suite, the technical blog posts, and the roadmap are all out in the open. Would love feedback from production users of Valkey or Redis on what observability gaps you're still hitting.

GitHub: https://github.com/BetterDB-inc/monitor
Blog: https://www.betterdb.com/blog
by komali2 | 2026-02-12 14:56:49+00:00
It's an interesting question, but it's too narrowly focused. Surely we can think of more risk-reward structures than just "founding engineer?" What about worker co-ops? Revenue sharing agreements? Profit sharing? Equity on top of salary? Base pay plus performance?

Capital owners aren't the only ones taking a risk, laborers do as well. Why is it that only capital risk is considered?
Show HN: Mem – deterministic CLI memory sidecar for dev workflows
by arthurborgesdev | 2026-02-12 14:57:05+00:00
I built mem, a deterministic CLI-first memory sidecar for dev workflows.

It stores append-only JSONL events (commits, agent runs, decisions) and deterministically compacts to state.json + MEMORY.md so humans/agents can recover context quickly.

Design constraints:
- local files only
- no network access at runtime
- no daemon
- POSIX sh + jq tooling

I’d love feedback on:
1) data model / event schema
2) compaction strategy
3) where this breaks in real team workflows
by lp0_on_fire | 2026-02-12 14:57:06+00:00
The person operating a tool is responsible for what it does. If I start my lawn mower, tie a rope to it and put a brick on the gas pedal so it mows my lawn while I make dinner and the damned thing ends up running over someone's foot TECHNICALLY I didn't run over someone's foot but I sure as hell created the conditions for it.

We KNOW these tools are not perfect. We KNOW these tools do stupid shit from time to time. We KNOW they deviate from their prompts for...reasons.

Creating the conditions for something bad to happen then hand waving away the consequences because "how could we have known" or "how could we have controlled for this" just doesn't fly, imo.
by CuriouslyC | 2026-02-12 14:57:14+00:00
The reason Anthropic is pushing on the closed harness is that they're not confident with their ability to win on model quality long term, so they're trying to build lock-in. They can capture some additional telemetry owning the harness as well, but given the amount of data the agent loop already transmits, that borders on unethical spyware (which might be part of the reason they're afraid to open source).

Ultimately the market is going to force them to open up and let people flex their subs.
by deaux | 2026-02-12 14:57:15+00:00
But that too goes for the others all the same. We all pay with our health because some people fly with private jets, or drive Lambos, or indeed eat hamburgers every day. Our health being quite the more precious resource than our money.

But even on the subject of electricity costs. It looks like the biggest electricity consuming sector globally is.. the oil industry! So we're back to the Lambo drivers.
by slibhb | 2026-02-12 14:57:20+00:00
What's better? Artists competing for the mass public, artists trying to please individual rich patrons, or artists trying to placate some government commission?

I think a mix is fine. But there are disadvantages if you weigh too heavily on the latter two. In Europe, there's already quite a lot of government subsidies for art. Try finding a British or French movie that doesn't open by announcing its connection with some government subsidy program. While I quite like quite a lot of what Europe produces (especially cinema), in the long run I suspect it won't be sustainable. Whereas the free(r) market approach of e.g. the US and Japan will end up ahead.
by paxys | 2026-02-12 14:57:51+00:00
Political party in power makes it an explicit goal to dismantle government agencies and privatize all regulations, safety, security, environmental protections.

Chaos ensues.

Average American - "This isn't about politics. Both sides are to blame. We must work together."

Unless people collectively get their heads out of their asses the situation isn't going to magically reverse itself.
by chrisweekly | 2026-02-12 14:58:07+00:00
Great post. A few choice quotes:

> Often the model isn’t flaky at understanding the task. It’s flaky at expressing itself. You’re blaming the pilot for the landing gear.

> The model is the moat. The harness is the bridge. Burning bridges just means fewer people bother to cross. Treating harnesses as solved, or even inconsequential, is very short-sighted.

> The gap between “cool demo” and “reliable tool” isn’t model magic. It’s careful, rather boring, empirical engineering at the tool boundary.
by andsoitis | 2026-02-12 14:58:09+00:00
> You're smack in the middle of accepting the unacceptable because of normalization of deviance.

To get a little personal, I will just say that you don't know what's in my heart or on my mind.

To get back on point:

> None of this is 'typical American policy'.

Mabye you will say I'm being pedantic, but I think that's a categorically false statement.

> Your calibration point should not be Trump 1 but the Obama or Clinton administrations which were if not super popular at least competent.

Why cherry pick those two? What about more recent (Biden) or further back? I think you will find that there's a lot of things that are persistent over the last 250 years, including political violence, xenophobia, detaining people without due process, invading other countries, tarriffs, rhetoric that Europe should pay for its own defense, etc.

To be clear, I'm not saying any of these are OK.
There are also other positive dynamics that persist, like Americans pushing back and the administration needing to retreat and adjust.
by 5upplied_demand | 2026-02-12 14:58:21+00:00
Other people have already shared the multiple statements Trump has made, I've added some below.

> “I won’t say cancel the election, they should cancel the election...”

> "You Won't Have to Vote Anymore"

> "The Republicans should say: 'We want to take over. We should take over the voting in at least 15 places.' The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,"
by bartblast | 2026-02-12 14:59:15+00:00
It depends on what you're doing. I've been in Elixir web dev for about 7 years and never really needed to write or understand Erlang, outside of my work on Hologram. That said, Erlang is always there under the surface - it "leaks" into Elixir in places if you look at the stdlib, and understanding it gives you a better mental model of the whole platform. I'd say you don't need it on a daily basis for most Elixir work, but the runtime and OTP are incredible pieces of engineering, and getting to know Erlang better will only make you stronger in this ecosystem.
Show HN: VibeDB – store anything with zero config
by StevenSLXie | 2026-02-12 14:59:42+00:00
I built VibeDB, a tiny local database for small end-user tools and side projects: store whatever object shape you want, without setting up a DB or designing schemas upfront.

Why

When building small utilities (CLI tools, desktop scripts, lightweight web apps), I often need “a bit of persistence” (settings, history, cached results, user data), but I don’t want to stop and set up Postgres/Mongo, write migrations, or keep switching to ad-hoc SQL. I wanted persistence to feel like “just store objects” and keep everything in one local file.

What it is

Zero config: one local file

Document-style: store nested objects / mixed shapes (schema-later)

Query without SQL: simple dict filters or a small query builder

Optional Studio UI to inspect/edit/query data locally
Show HN: HZ Chat – A simple session-based chat tool
by hezhichaohk | 2026-02-12 15:00:09+00:00
Hi HN, I’m the developer of HZ Chat.

HZ Chat is a simple session-based chat tool for quick conversations.
It’s designed for moments where you just need to talk and move on.

Chats are tied to active sessions and automatically end after inactivity.

Happy to answer any questions or hear feedback.
by PaulHoule | 2026-02-12 15:00:32+00:00
I will "flip the script" and say I see it goes both ways: other people lose their jobs to Indian immigrants but those Indian immigrants are frequently underpaid and otherwise exploited.

More than once I've seen very talented Indians get mistreated. At one startup I worked at they put an Indian immigrant on an H-1B through some crazy abuse which made our new HR manager quit. I wanted to tell him "your skills are in demand, you could get a job across the street" but because he was on an H-1B.

I quit the ACM for a few reasons and unqualified support for the H-1B program was one of them. I joined the IEEE Computer Society instead because the IEEE takes no position on the issue. As I see it, Indians are treated particularly poorly by the US immigration system because "there are so many Indians", yet with a high level of education and an entrepreneurial attitude they make a strongly positive contribution to our economy.
by quietbritishjim | 2026-02-12 15:00:43+00:00
Strongly agreed. And, as well as noticing actual semantic issues, it's worth noting where they've mixed up abstractions or just allowed a file to grow to an unsustainable size and needs refactoring. You can ask the AI agent to do the refactoring, with some guidance (e.g. split up this file into three files named x, y, z; put this sort of thing in x, ...). This helps you as a human to understand their changes, and also helps the AI. They'll often need a little final tuning afterwards (either by hand or ask the AI again) e.g. please move this flag from x to y.

As is often the case, it's just like you have an enthusiastic and very fast but quite junior dev working for you.
by specialist | 2026-02-12 15:01:00+00:00
Becoming a working artist requires sacrifice and commitment.

Joshua Citarella (Doomscroll podcast) often talks about the practicalities of producing art.

In 1970's a (starving) artist worked part-time job (eg waiter), enabling them to focus on their craft most of the week.

Today, typical artist has to hustle, juggling 3 jobs, and can only focus once per week on their one day off work.

Further, "entry level" jobs are unpaid / underpaid. Such as internships at a museum or newspaper. Ditto teaching positions.

Consequently, only affluent persons are able to break into the creative disciplines (production of culture). Trust funds, nepotism, and other lottery winners.

--

I, for one, enthusiastically support heavily subsidizing both creative and caring work. All those "not-for-profit" gigs and unpaid labor. They're the grease that keeps society working. Despite not being tabulated in someone's payroll accounting system.
by jandrese | 2026-02-12 15:01:27+00:00
If Gmail rejects emails from your domain it is up to you to fix it. Google is not going to change, and enough of your users will be interacting with people on Gmail that you have to fix it. It doesn't help that Google has been pushing people away from running their own email and into Google's services by ever tightening what it accepts over the years. More than one person has given up on their email server because it was a constant battle with Google, Microsoft, and company to not have important emails disappear into the void.
by ben_w | 2026-02-12 15:01:56+00:00
Putting this note first, because it's probably the main point of confusion/surprise: I did say "bill of materials"; the estimated full cost for European and US grid upgrades that we need anyway for other reasons, with far less material, is order-of a trillion or so for US, half a trillion for EU.

For the material cost, just applied maths. By sheer coincidence, 1Ω of aluminium around the world is very close to 1m^2 cross section: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=40000km+*+resistance+al...

This is almost exactly 1e8 (100 million) tons: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=40000km+*+1m%5E2+*+dens...

This is $223bn at current prices: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=40000km+*+1m%5E2+*+dens...

For scale, this is about what China makes in 2 years; if this is rolled out over 30, which would be optimistic but plausible, it's within the realm of just how much China increased production between 2023 and 2025, being spent every year.

To get to 10x ITER's own estimate for ITER, the wikipedia page says the organisation estimates the reactor will cost about €18-22bn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER

There are a lot of reasons not to do this as a single big 1m^2 "wire", amongst them being that the surface magnetic field is strong enough to be dangerous to approach with ferrous materials.
by spwa4 | 2026-02-12 15:02:05+00:00
I would argue it just means the game doesn't suddenly change all at once. If the game changes slowly, in the short term it'll be good for Nvidia. It will take quite a while for it to affect Nvidia.

Google, Amazon and Meta are to some extent solving the wrong problem, or not solving the whole problem. They're designing chips ... which they can't build because they don't have the infrastructure and don't have as long running contracts as Nvidia does. They can't match Nvidia even at 3nm, at 10nm ... Now, maybe they can go with Intel (though several have tried and given up), but ...
by closewith | 2026-02-12 15:02:19+00:00
Classic false dilemma. You're trying to frame my comment as “we can only ever fix one problem” when it is, in fact, “we have constrained resources and urgent systemic failures and so prioritisation is important”.

For example, Budget 2026 did not address the €307 million structural shortfall in university funding. Is basic income for artists a better allocation than third-level education? Or capital expenditure on cancer care? Or NAS opex?

I specifically disagree with this allocation of funds as we live in country filled with specific solvable structural and life-limiting problems that should be solved before artist wellbeing.
by scythe | 2026-02-12 15:02:25+00:00
The author is fairly clear about it to me:

>One of the biggest mistakes I see artists make is painting things that don't resonate with people. Once you have an aesthetic that works, the market rewards you for exploring adjacent aesthetic territory. You might not make a living right away — it took me over two years from when I painted that first Honey Bear until I took my art full time — but it is totally necessary if you are to make a living off your own art (as opposed to teaching or commercial art). Until then, if what you're doing isn't resonating, you just need to just paint something else. Experiment with different concepts and directions until you find something that works.

He doesn't spend a whole lot of time deliberating on the literature versus television question, but it's easy to see what he's chosen.
by chii | 2026-02-12 15:02:44+00:00
A piece of paper doesn't make any difference if what's written is not observed, nor the rules it laid out followed. The fact that the president can commit crimes - like declaring war without the approval of congress - and have no consequences, means that the problem isn't with the written text, it's in enforcing it. And citizens can only enforce it with elections, or with civil unrest.
by agentultra | 2026-02-12 15:03:06+00:00
This is the worst possible take. It dismisses an entire branch of science that has been studying neurology for decades. Biological brains exist, we study them, and no they are not like computers at all.

There have been charlatans repeating this idea of a “computational interpretation,” of biological processes since at least the 60s and it needs to be known that it was bunk then and continues to be bunk.

Update: There's no need for Chinese Room thought experiments. The outcome isn't what defines sentience, personhood, intelligence, etc. An algorithm is an algorithm. A computer is a computer. These things matter.
by casey2 | 2026-02-12 15:03:23+00:00
Why is the title so misleading? That isn't at all what the study measured. Just read the article
1) looked at a group of 80-year-olds for 8 years
2) checked their economic status throughout life using reading and leisure time (# of library and museum visits as a proxy)
3) Found that higher scores in lifetime enrichment were associated with a 38% lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease and a 36% lower risk of MCI.

They did everything possible so you wouldn't draw the idiotic conclusion and yet you still clickbait. Shameful! A rise in shark attacks doesn't increase ice cream sales.
Reading and writing Absolutely CANNOT lower dementia risk and you are a liar if you claim otherwise. If you want to lower your dementia risk be born with a higher SES.
by luxuryballs | 2026-02-12 15:03:43+00:00
I can’t overemphasize the number of times I happened to end up walking outside in nature, most recently sledding, and suddenly had clarity on some next steps for a solution I was working on… not just nothing on your desk but no desk! It’s so hard to remember, especially in winter, but it feels closer to real magic than anything running on a computer even in the age of “ai”!
by pclmulqdq | 2026-02-12 15:04:16+00:00
The general guidance if you are writing for amateurs is to stop the tenor and soprano sections at their respective "high G" and if you are writing for professionals to avoid going above their B. Amateur choirs will often sing music written for professionals (eg all the masterworks), and you will end up getting A's or Bb's but without expectations that it will sound good.
by Nursie | 2026-02-12 15:04:19+00:00
I would argue it also belongs in decisions of whether to convict and what to convict someone of.

The law cannot encode the entirety of human experience, and can’t foresee every possible mitigating circumstance. Given the fact of a conviction regardless of sentence can have such a huge impact on someone’s life, I think there is room for compassion and good judgement in multiple places.
by renato_shira | 2026-02-12 15:04:22+00:00
great breakdown. the gap between "what people say they want" and "what job they're actually hiring the product for" is something i keep running into.

one thing that helped me a lot was realizing my product wasn't competing with other products in the same category at all. the actual competition was boredom, doomscrolling, and the default state of not paying attention to your own day. once you frame it that way, the whole feature prioritization changes because you're solving for a completely different job.

the bosch example is perfect for this: you can keep adding features that address the stated preference, or you can go one level deeper and address the actual constraint. most teams optimize for the former because it's easier to A/B test.
by bagacrap | 2026-02-12 15:04:26+00:00
Must feel pretty good when rich people get into a bidding war over your product!

I have a hobby and I don't get compensated for it (quite the opposite). It's not making art, but if art were my calling I could quite easily see myself making it without any hope of monetary reward. There are plenty of people who have the same hobby as me and don't have a job -- they pursue it as is it's a job, though most are not paid either. I view that as some combination of privilege and laziness.

If there's any problem here it's that people don't have enough time to pursue hobbies. I only have enough time because I work from home (no time wasted commuting). Perhaps the government should focus on where we as a society waste people's time and energy such that they have none left over for hobbies.
by amelius | 2026-02-12 15:04:42+00:00
Gripe only related to email in general: what annoys me to no end is that if my boss forwards me an email and asks me to reply to it (to everybody in the original email) then I have to type in or copy+paste all the addresses from the Fwd attachment (using Fastmail, but this problem exists everywhere). Instead, there should be a button to make that easy.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-12 15:04:55+00:00
> Like most things - assume the "20/100/200" dollar deals that are great now are going to go down the enshitification route very rapidly.

I don’t assume this at all. In fact, the opposite has been happening in my experience: I try multiple providers at the same time and the $20/month plans have only been getting better with the model improvements and changes. The current ChatGPT $20/month plan goes a very long way even when I set it to “Extra High” whereas just 6 months ago I felt like the $20/month plans from major providers were an exercise in bouncing off rate limits for anything non-trivial.

Inference costs are only going to go down from here and models will only improve. I’ve been reading these warnings about the coming demise of AI plans for 1-2 years now, but the opposite keeps happening.
by rvdhof | 2026-02-12 15:05:01+00:00
I'm building Mengi Cloud (https://app.mengi.cloud) - For over 25 years I've been working in IT and automation and this is my attempt at finally starting a business doing what I do best.

Over the last 10 years I've been automating kubernetes cloud environments and no matter what company I end up working at, eventually they all want the same. Easy deployments and -not- having a degree in Kubernetes knowledge to run their apps.

In addition there's a growing amount of people/companies wanting to move away from US-owned cloud providers (the big three), so I figured, I'll combine everything. Easy to create deployments on whatever cloud with a focus on being able to migrate from one provider to the other.

The more I'm working on it, the more ideas I keep getting and wanting to add to the platform. I would really appreciate feedback from anyone no matter how big or small the criticism!