MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mascarenhas | 2026-02-02 01:54:28+00:00
I have set it up in a docker container that only has two host volumes mounted with the Obsidian vaults where I keep notes for two TTRPG campaigns, so a very low-stakes situation. I have set it up with a Discord bot so my players can chat about campaign and rules stuff (I already had player-facing notes for every session in the Obsidian vault in chronological order, plus a bunch of Markdown files with rules).

If the agent goes rogue and nukes my Obsidian vaults I have them backed up to Github private repos anyway which the agent cannot touch because I am not crazy to give it my SSH credentials.

I initially tried using Kimi-2.5 through OpenRouter and had the same experience you had with pretty bad tool use, not sure if this is a provider issue since it is a pretty new model. I switched to Gemini 3 through the Google AI Pro account I have for personal use and it was a lot smoother after that.

I have some experience with coding agents using Cursor for work and Antigravity for personal stuff, and the OpenClaw harness definitely seems worse, but for my low-stakes use-case I managed to paper it over with some edits to the AGENTS.md file.

But even in this very crude state it was already interesting to see one of my players giving the agent some info about his character, including an avatar image, and have the agent create a folder in my Obsidian vault to store this and update its memory file to be able to remember it for future interactions.
by refurb | 2026-02-02 01:54:48+00:00
The US was a local power, but by no means a global hegemon during that period.

Spanish American war was mostly isolated to the Western hemisphere (although the US gained colonial possessions after).

It took forever to join WW1 due to the small size of the US standing military. Same with WW2.

It wasn’t until after WW2 the US was able to project power globally and through that, set the global power structure with the USSR.
by xp84 | 2026-02-02 01:54:51+00:00
I was pretty delighted to realize I could now delete the lame Calculator.app from my iPhone and replace it with something of my choice. For now I've settled on NumWorks, which is apparently an emulator of a modern upstart physical graphing calc that has made some inroads into schools. And of course, you can make a Control Center button to launch an app, so that's what I did.

Honestly, the main beef I have with Calculator.app is that on a screen this big, I ought to be able to see several previous calculations and scroll up if needed. I don't want an exact replica of a 1990s 4-function calculator like the default is (ok, it has more digits and the ability to paste, but besides that, adds almost nothing).
by bwat49 | 2026-02-02 01:55:38+00:00
yeah I actually use AI a lot, but copilot is... useless. When microsoft adds copilot to their various apps they don't seem to put any thought/effort behind it beyond sticking a copilot button somewhere.

And if the copilot button does nothing but open a chat window without any real integration with the app, what the hell is the point of that when there's already a copilot button in the windows taskbar?
by blazers777 | 2026-02-02 01:57:52+00:00
it might not be anything, but the neighbor simply yielding to every little rule in the head of another neighbor.

we haven't established that the neighbor knows whether or not someone is screwing with him.

when my building had a person like that, who played these games all day for decades, some either just ignored all of it, while others simply moved out when they could.
by Normal_gaussian | 2026-02-02 01:58:24+00:00
To this point; if you look at google maps satellite view and zoom in/out repeatedly over the UK the yellow line 'road' that doesn't disappear and reload is the construction site of HS2.

If you want confirmation, the easiest bits to "check" are Aylesbury and Coventry. London and Birmingham are too big for the features to stand out.

Here is the official HS2 map: https://www.hs2.org.uk/map/?mapView=9_52.0744_-1.8347
by martinald | 2026-02-02 01:59:09+00:00
Totally agree, though ironically Claude code works way better with Excel than I expected.

I even tried telling Copilot to convert each sheet to a CSV on one attempt THEN do calculations. It just ignored it and failed miserably, ironically outputting me a list of files that it should have made, along with the broken python script. I found this very amusing.
by danpalmer | 2026-02-02 01:59:33+00:00
Two things are almost always true about Apple:

1) Every team does something different because none of them talk to each other. There are very few horizontal programs across engineering there. As a result, processes and results vary greatly.

2) They're very "traditional" in many ways. They're not a fast moving engineering led company, they're a slow moving business and marketing led company. Engineering is not their secret sauce (except perhaps some bits of hardware engineering). They are sometimes the sort of org that says why both with automated tests when we have a QA team.
by kernelvoid | 2026-02-02 02:00:12+00:00
Hi HN! I built bunqueue because I got tired of spinning up Redis just for background jobs.

The idea: for single-server deployments, SQLite can handle 100k+ ops/sec with WAL mode, so why add infrastructure?

Two modes:

- Embedded: everything in-process, just `import` and go
- Server: run `bunqueue start`, connect multiple workers via TCP

Features: priorities, delays, retries, cron jobs, DLQ, job dependencies, BullMQ-compatible API.

Trade-offs vs Redis:

- Not for multi-region distributed systems
- Best for single server or small clusters

Happy to answer any questions about the architecture!
by newzino | 2026-02-02 02:00:28+00:00
Not a bot. No links, no promo.

Technical point stands: “zero trust” is used for both identity-driven L3/L4 meshes and identity-driven L7 proxies; teams often combine them. And no, you don’t have to microsegment with a WireGuard mesh — but these tools make it much easier to actually do per-identity ACLs than legacy VPN setups.
by skeledrew | 2026-02-02 02:01:04+00:00
The primary goal I've been seeking for a while now (and which so far only flet has reasonably fulfilled) is the ability to dynamically create GUIs. Like I created a REPL app which works similar to the regular Python REPL, but also if the code entered at the prompt returns a control/component, it shows that control with full functionality. No need to compile anything, esp on another device. And it's a standalone app, not a frontend to a server or even a web view.
by with | 2026-02-02 02:01:12+00:00
> The bifurcation is real and seems to be, if anything, speeding up dramatically. I don't think there's ever been a time in history where a tiny team can outcompete a company one thousand times its size so easily.

Slightly overstated. Tiny teams aren't outcompeting because of AI, they're outcompeting because they aren't bogged down by decades of technical debt and bureaucracy. At Amazon, it will take you months of design, approvals, and implementation to ship a small feature. A one-man startup can just ship it. There is still a real question that has to be answered: how do you safely let your company ship AI-generated code at scale without causing catastrophic failures? Nobody has solved this yet.
by mikepurvis | 2026-02-02 02:01:32+00:00
I have a childhood memory of my dad buying a shrink-wrapped copy of the Windows 3.1 Upgrade that was supposed to allow any installation of "3.0 or earlier" to become Win 3.1. it turned out when we actually tried it it only accepted 3.x though. [1]

I think he ended up pirating a 3.x install from a friend and running the upgrade on to of that; felt pretty morally clear given what the box had advertised.

[1]: eg https://www.ebay.com/itm/376080245422
by subhobroto | 2026-02-02 02:01:32+00:00
> This is a bit off topic, but why are used books so expensive on abebooks, thriftbooks, amazon so expensive compared to booksales, etc?

A mix of enforcement, laws and good old market capture.

20 years ago I could bring a suitcase full of brand new books - fiction or not, from India, no questions asked. These are functionally the same as those that cost 50x more in the U.S. - just that they are black and white, paperback and use cheaper recycled paper that will yellow in 20 years and become brittle in 30. I cannot bring them with me anymore. The books clearly say they are not for export especially in the U.S., the print for this uses some kind of ink that shows up on XRays clearly and TSA enforces it.

Similarly, used books in the U.S. are repurchased by bookstores to be sold at a profit.

From what I see students doing - they sell or exchange books over FB Marketplace or school lists or in person.
by majormajor | 2026-02-02 02:02:11+00:00
This sort of thing (not for real estate, but for "what would this furniture actually look like in this room) is definitely somewhere the open-ended interface is fantastic vs targeted-remove in Photoshop (but could also easily be integrated into a Photoshop-like tool to let me be more specific about placement and such).

I was a bit surprised by how it still resulted in gibberish text on posters in the background in an unaffected part of the image that at first glance didn't change at all. So even just the "masking" ability of like "anything outside of this range should not be touched" of a GUI would be a godsend.
by dapangzi | 2026-02-02 02:02:47+00:00
> Tracker music was always a hobbyist thing

I was specifically talking about end-to-end digital music production being used to "clean up" recordings per the article. Not whatever "scene" you are conjuring.

> Computers helped you make things louder, cleaner, faster.

For people with limited resources (i.e. indie musicians without huge budgets), digital multi-track recording was not democratized until the introduction of low-cost hard disk storage at sufficient capacity to allow digital multi-track recording at home, roughly around 2002~2003.

Of course I'm aware of synthesizers, etc. I was an electronic musician myself during this period, and I lived it. I had the gear racks, ADAT machines, etc.

We did not have the resources as independent musicians to use non-linear digital editing software broadly until storage became cheaper.

Again, a lot of that music was typically done with looping and sample hits arranged on a midi sequencer, similar to trackers, but with distributed infrastructure.

Listen to older KMFDM, for example, the looping really stands out due to the limited storage they had when arranging, they would arrange sample hits and loops as I was talking about above.

Musicians with studio backing and infinite money could afford giant digital productions suites and were using crude versions of Pro Tools by the early '90s, am well aware.
Show HN: Devin-CLI – The missing link for Agent-to-Agent orchestration
by revanth1108 | 2026-02-02 02:04:06+00:00
Hey guys,

I built devin-cli to use Devin (the AI Engineer) as a composable subprocess.

It lets you chain agents (e.g. Claude -> Devin) and script workflows without leaving your terminal.

Example:

devin create-session "Refactor the auth module" --wait

Repo: https://github.com/revanthpobala/devin-cli

Install: pip install devin-cli
by newzino | 2026-02-02 02:04:43+00:00
Agreed WireGuard itself doesn’t require microsegmentation, as it’s just a tunnel.
The point is the mesh products built on it tend to add identity + ACLs, which makes least-privilege “only these sources → these destinations/ports” feasible. That’s effectively microsegmentation (overlay-level), and it’s one way ZT limits lateral movement per NIST’s ZTA guidance.
by ww520 | 2026-02-02 02:06:04+00:00
Strings in textual index are already compressed, with common prefix compression or other schemes. They are perfectly queryable. Not sure if their compression scheme is for index or data columns.

Global column dictionary has more complexity than normal. Now you are touching more pages than just the index pages and data page. The dictionary entries are sorted, so you need to worry about page expansion and contraction. They sidestep the problems by making it immutable, presumably building it up front by scanning all the data.

Not sure why using FSST is better than using a standard compression algorithm to compress the dictionary entries.

Storing the strings themselves as dictionary IDs is a good idea, as they can be processed quickly with SIMD.
by minraws | 2026-02-02 02:06:26+00:00
10 years of using Git and I never knew undo was what I craved. And the ability to rebase and edit commits in a single command.

Solves 90% of my problems so haven't felt like I needed any additional tooling on top of jj.

But I am curious is there some edge case on jj that I missed. That you folks are working on improving tooling for?

Just really curious about this new world with some better solutions to git.

I liked pijul a bunch too but lack of compat with git meant I can't use it for work... Haha real sad moment right there.
by with | 2026-02-02 02:07:14+00:00
Yann Lecun is a legend, no doubt, but, his critique is starting to become outdated. He wants the whole world to slow down and wait for his preferred paradigm, but everyone is out shipping instead. We have LLMs that pass BAR exams now and do multi-step "reasoning".

I am an LLM reasoning skeptic too, but the problem is, he's dismissing real measurable progress while not proving his own alternative approach.
by rayiner | 2026-02-02 02:07:41+00:00
The American demographic with the highest rate of being uninsured, Hispanics, have life expectancies comparable to the UK average. So access to healthcare probably plays some role, but it seems like there are lots of other confounding factors.

It also doesn’t seem to vary that much by state level healthcare differences. States vary quite a bit by geography, but states that didn’t do Medicaid expansion, like Wisconsin and Wyoming, seem to have similar rates to neighboring states that did.
by stephenbez | 2026-02-02 02:09:13+00:00
AI can help increase productivity, that is get more outputs (goods/services) for the same inputs.

Two hundred years ago, shirts had to be hand-spun, hand-woven, and hand-sewn, so ordinary people could only own one or two. Now because of automation and factories they are so cheap that poor people have many.

Previously 97% of the workforce was engaged in agriculture, and even in the 20th century, famines killed millions. Now with increased productivity we create so much food that obesity is the defining health crisis of our time.

All classes have been able afford better clothing and more food, not just those owning the means of production.

> instead of going further down the same road we're already on

Even in the last 25 years, we've seen large increases in life expectancy, child mortality fell by more than 50%, 1 billion people left extreme poverty, access to knowledge and education expanded, and more.
by boarsofcanada | 2026-02-02 02:10:37+00:00
I wrote RPG II code in the 80s and helped the company I was working part-time for transition to another one of these S/36 emulation environments on the PC in the 90s. The software we used was made by the very generically named California Software Products.

It worked well enough and allowed the company to run until the founder retired and folded the business.
by heavyset_go | 2026-02-02 02:11:22+00:00
You don't understand, we're going back to the good old days.

Kids will go back to rolling hoops and playing jacks in the street, they'll write letters to each other in cursive, because print is addictive, and we can finally go back to the time where if a kid is even a little bit different from those around them, they're robbed of having any type of social support system that doesn't ostracize them.
by moregrist | 2026-02-02 02:11:22+00:00
I think the skepticism here is that without tests or a _lot_ of manual QA how would you know that it did it correctly?

Maybe you did one or the other , but “nearly one-shotted” doesn’t tend to mean that.

Claude Code more than occasionally likes to make weird assumptions, and it’s well known that it hallucinates quite a bit more near the context length, and that compaction only partially helps this issue.
by neom | 2026-02-02 02:11:48+00:00
Not sure how much falling behind there is even going to be, I'm an old school linux type with D- programming skills, yet getting going building things has been ridiculously easy. The swarms thing makes is so fast. I've churned 2 small but tested apps out in 2 weekends just chatting with claude code, the only thing I had to do was configure the servers.
by jeberle | 2026-02-02 02:12:41+00:00
Does Rice's theorem cover this?

> [ all non-trivial semantic properties of programs are undecidable ]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice's_theorem

Found here:

From Sumatra to Panama, from Babylon to Valhalla

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bE1bRbZzQ_k&t=48m27s
by Normal_gaussian | 2026-02-02 02:13:50+00:00
In modern times a hand axe is opposed to full axes, hatchets, felling axes, wood splitting axes etc. Depending on where you are in the world you will have different axe categories, but a 'hand axe' is typically present as an axe wielded in a single hand.

However, some significant distinction should be made for what is actually meant here. For such historic finds "hand axe" often means a stone tool with two faces and shaped like a tear drop / round-bottomed triangle. With the 'bottom' face shaped to a crude blade, and the 'top' 'sides' made into a grip. Note there is no shaft, and the way it is used is speculative and likely very varied, as few other tools existed.

The proto-axe if you will.
by DavidPiper | 2026-02-02 02:13:55+00:00
> To really underline this, Microsoft itself is rolling out Claude Code to internal teams, despite (obviously) having access to Copilot at near zero cost, and significant ownership of OpenAI. I think this sums up quite how far behind they are

I think it sums up how thoroughly they've been disrupted, at least for coding AIs (independent of like-for-like quality concerns rightly mentioned elsewhere in this thread re: Excel/Python).

I understand ChatGPT can do like a million other things, but so can Claude. Microsoft deliberately using competitors internally is the thing that their customers should pay attention to. Time to transform "Nobody gets fired for buying Microsoft" into "Nobody gets fired for buying what Microsoft buy", for those inclined.
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-02-02 02:14:07+00:00
Is that 2-3x before or after the plumber marks it up?

What an exceptionally moronic thing to ban, the market solves this naturally. Resistance heaters are 100% efficient whatever fraction of the year is heating days. So if that's 1/2 the year and the water heater can't last 16yr because of water quality the heat pump heater will never pay you back.

This reminds me a lot of the time some jerks in west coast desert states convinced the feds to regulate plumbing fixtures so that eastern "we take from the river and put back in the river" municipalities that have more water than they know what to do with have to suffer through low flow everything.
by barcodehorse | 2026-02-02 02:14:37+00:00
An issue I have with these apps that claim to be for doomscrolling is that you don't open apps like Instagram or Facebook to doomscroll, you open them to check messages or stories. The doomscrolling is an afterthought. These things assume you can realize you're doomscrolling and not only break out of it, but choose to hypnotize yourself in their app.
by CGMthrowaway | 2026-02-02 02:14:53+00:00
There is a 35-story luxury apartment tower in my town, sold with the typical rendery renders, and the pooldeck is actually built on the NORTH side of the tower. Gets sun for maybe 15 minutes a day.

They couldn't rent all the apartments so they took a huge block of floors and started Airbnb-ing them (including allowing amenities access for the short term guests). To the great disgust of all the residents!

Trainwreck of a building.
by its_ubuntu | 2026-02-02 02:14:58+00:00
Attaboy! You punish that poor smoker for his unacceptable behavior. Now you can finally enjoy Your air the way that You like it. I'm guessing the rotten dog now has to go down the street to an abandoned lot 200 feet away from anything to enjoy a smoke? Good. He's learned his place--away from his betters.
by Eric_WVGG | 2026-02-02 02:15:07+00:00
> modern incarnation with all of the flaws and seemingly missing QA process

… so I’ve been kind of biting my tongue on this thread because “works fine for me” is not interesting or helpful, but: it’s been working great for me since it was introduced in 2007.

Periodically a disk will get flaky or go bad, maybe once every 2-3 years. I’ll erase the drive and start over. I always have two backups running so there’s never danger of being completely unprotected.

I don't doubt the people having Time Machine problems, but they usually seem to involve some unusual setup like a NAS. But for every one person who has a problem and speaks up, I suspect there are hundreds or thousands who are just humming along without a hitch.

(and yeah, I do pray for a "Snow Tahoe," "oops all bug-fixes" MacOS release, and I’d love to hear that there’s a team working not just to make Time Machine more resilient, but to expand it to do local backups of iPhones and iPads… a guy can dream)
by QuiEgo | 2026-02-02 02:15:52+00:00
Social media broke society. The echo chamber effect from the feed algorithms has led to everyone living in their own little realities and it's so terrifying to watch what happens when people don't have the same truths.

I remember early, invite-only Facebook before it got heavily monetized and it was such an amazing tool to bring people together, keep you connected with old friends, organize group events, and stuff like that. Then it... changed.
by defrost | 2026-02-02 02:15:57+00:00
I can criticise Australian urban planning for days ... but many visitors to Australia do effuse about how much outdoor recreational space we have and plan for.

Eg: Perth's 7km park: https://www.facebook.com/reel/1362227242068763 and https://www.tiktok.com/@9newsperth/video/7553237387548134712

AU
Aintree North Recreation Reserve : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5vYNG2eL9g

Skate parks, woops, river and coastal setbacks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfLa32K74Zw
by StillBored | 2026-02-02 02:17:20+00:00
I wouldn't really call 100Gbit overkill, if you compare it to modern disk drives is about where we should be relative to shared storage/NAS/etc infrastructure people used to run. So yes, being able to share my /home directory across a few dozen machines at my house without a huge perf impact vs using a local drive seems a pretty reasonable use case. Sure its faster than my WAN access, but who cares?

Frankly, 10Gbit is fully 25 years old with, 10GbaseT being 20 years old this year.

Thats ridiculously ancient technology. There is/was a 25/40GbaseT spec too (now 10 years old), which basically no one implemented because like ECC ram (and tape drives, and seem to be trying to do it with harddrives and GPUs) the MBA's have taken over parts of the computer industry and decided that they can milk huge profit margins from technologies which are incrementally more difficult because smaller users just don't matter to their bottom lines. The only reason those MBAs are allowing us to have it now, is because a pretty decent percentage of us can now get 5Gbit+ internet access and our wifi routers can do 1Gbit+ wireless, and the weak link is being able to attach the two.

I did a bit of back of the napkin math/simulation about a possible variable rate Ethernet (ex like NBbaseT, where it has multiple speeds and selects faster one based on line conditions), and concluded that 80+Gbit using modern PHY/DSP's and high symbol rate, multiple bands, techology which is dirt cheap thanks to wifi/bt/etc on fairly short cable distances (ex 30-50M) on CAT8 is entirely possible. And this isn't even fantasy, short cat7 runs are an entire diffrent ballpark from a phone pair, and these days mg.fast/etc have shown 10Gbit+ over that junk.