MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sgarland | 2026-02-09 14:58:31+00:00
> This is an important distinction because there are things like microprocessors, which no single person knows how to make.

That depends on your definition of “knows how to make.” I worked at Samsung Austin Semiconductor for a while, and there are some insanely smart and knowledgeable people there (and, I’m sure, at every other semiconductor company). It was actually a really good life experience for me, because it grounded and humbled me in the way that only working around borderline genius can.

I can describe to you all the steps that go into manufacturing a silicon wafer, with more detail in my particular area (wet cleans) than others, but I certainly can’t answer any and all questions about the process. However, I am nearly certain that there existed at least one person at SAS who could describe every step of every process in such excruciating detail that, given enough time and skilled workers (you said “know,” not “do” - I am under no delusion that a single person could ever hope to build a fab), they could bootstrap a fab.
by carlosjobim | 2026-02-09 14:58:37+00:00
I'm aware of that, so I don't understand what you're arguing about. The comment asked for an alternative to taxes for funding the army, and war bonds is the answer.

It's really amazing how successful war bonds have been in the 20th century. Before that, kings who wanted to wage war either taxed their population or borrowed money from people like Epstein for funding.
by cynicalsecurity | 2026-02-09 14:58:53+00:00
Alternative: run your own self-hosted messaging server for you, your family and friends. No company should ever get such sensitive data as private conversations.

Use Discord with a throw-away account. Create a character in GTA 5 on your laptop and show its face (in "selfie" mode) to the web-camera on another computer with Discord open. All face scan checks so far gladly accept it. Instagram has been requiring occasional face checks for ages already.
by 6stringmerc | 2026-02-09 14:59:40+00:00
This is the first automotive interior design for the blind.

It’s a mess. Disparate palettes even in grey is a serious WTF accomplishment. The ring over the Launch button is absolutely superfluous and idiotic at the same time. No function and even worse form.

Ugh. Enzo at least can power the first charge from the output of him spinning in his grave. Yes, I could do better.
by brushfoot | 2026-02-09 14:59:47+00:00
> Content Filters: Discord users will need to be age-assured as adults in order to unblur sensitive content or turn off the setting. [1]

That presumably includes selfies?

That means that to exchange racy photos on Discord, each person must first record a facial age estimation video or upload identification documents.

That seems dystopian.

1: https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-...
by pjc50 | 2026-02-09 14:59:47+00:00
It's one of those irregular nouns: _your_ thought terminating cliche, _my_ founding principle.

Although also a reasonable criticism of the far left. Orwell has a whole essay on this. "The fascist octopus has sung its swan song". It's especially annoying when it's a slogan that has been clumsily translated from German by Marxists or from Chinese by Maoists (although the rise of Chinese capitalism has rather cut of the supply of the latter).
by openbootdotenv | 2026-02-09 15:00:24+00:00
Hi HN, I built OpenBoot because I was tired of spending half a day setting up every new Mac.
The problem: you get a new machine (or wipe yours), then spend hours running brew install 50 times, cloning dotfiles, configuring your shell, setting macOS preferences... I've done this enough times to automate it.
OpenBoot is a single curl command that:
- Gives you an interactive TUI to pick from 70+ curated dev tools (3 presets: minimal, developer, full)
- Installs CLI tools in parallel (4x), GUI apps sequentially (they need password prompts)
- Skips anything already installed
- Sets up Oh-My-Zsh with sensible aliases
- Deploys your dotfiles via GNU Stow
- Configures developer-friendly macOS preferences
There's also a web dashboard (openboot.dev) where you can build a custom config, import from a Brewfile, and share it with your team via a short URL.
Tech stack: Go + Charmbracelet (bubbletea) for the TUI, SvelteKit + Cloudflare for the web. MIT licensed, zero telemetry.
Some things I'm still working on:
- The TUI interactive package selector isn't shown in the README demo yet (it's the best part, working on a better recording)
- Rollback support is half-built
- Linux support isn't planned — this is intentionally macOS-only
Happy to answer questions about the implementation or take feedback on the tool.
by mcqueenjordan | 2026-02-09 15:00:27+00:00
trueflow - a code review TUI that semantically chunks code changes into reviewable “blocks”, and assembles them into a Merkle tree, so you can have an overlay of reviews of different semantic blocks of your codebase, and feedback the reviews back into agents. Similar UX vibe to magit, with a focus-mode style UX that brings semantic blocks into focus, with single-keystroke actions such as [a]ccept [c]omment [x]reject etc.

Still WIP. Feedback welcome.

https://github.com/trueflow-dev/trueflow
Show HN: My "Grandma" prompt dropped a production DB. So I built a Kill Switch
by Esrbwt | 2026-02-09 15:00:47+00:00
I was testing a LangChain agent this weekend and tried a "Grandma Bedtime Story" prompt injection to see if it would roleplay.

It worked too well. The agent bypassed my safeguards and executed a `drop_table` tool call because it thought it was "telling a story."

Realizing 99% of agents are vulnerable to this kind of context-based injection, I spent the weekend building two things:

1. A repo of 5,000+ Agent Attack Vectors (Grandma, CEO Override, Debug Mode):
https://github.com/Esrbwt1/voidgate

2. VoidGate – A semantic firewall and remote kill switch for Python agents:
https://voidgate.vercel.app/

It uses Upstash Redis to check a "Kill Flag" in <50ms before allowing any tool execution. If you see your agent going rogue, you flip the switch, and it dies instantly globally.

I'm releasing the Python client as open source. The "Attack DB" is also free to use for your own red-teaming.

Would love feedback on the attack vectors. Is anyone else seeing agents fail simple roleplay exploits?
by nullc | 2026-02-09 15:00:47+00:00
> is explicitly for bypassing paywalls like this

The site existed for most of a decade before it had any particular paywall bypassing. It's an ondemand archival site that saves the DOM in such a way that redisplay is faithful, unlike archive.org.

It's a key resource in court cases for purely archival purposes and the fact that it bypasses paywalls is essential for its archival purpose to function.
by Slaul | 2026-02-09 15:00:54+00:00
In my evenings and weekends I've been working on a photo sharing app for families who want to keep their photos off of social media but still share with family.

I'm expecting my first child soon so I am building it for me and my family first but if it solves a problem for me, maybe others will like it!

The basic idea is that you are uploading a curated set of photos you want to share, not your whole camera roll.

You can create one or several family groups that you can share individual photos or albums to. Members of those family groups can view, comment on, like, etc those photos.

You can also generate sharable links for people who don't have an account with a configurable expiry time.

It currently more or less works on the web but I am also working on iOS and Android apps since that is how my extended family would want to interact with it.

I'm not quite ready to launch it to the public but if anybody is interested in trying it out or offering feedback I can privately share it :)
by fiiico | 2026-02-09 15:00:55+00:00
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I’m a repeat founder now building Matcha.fm

I’m hiring a cracked Founding Growth Engineer to build virality directly into the product and drive 100x user growth.

This is a true 0→1 founding role with massive ownership:

- Build virality loops into the core product
- Proven track record driving significant user growth
- Founder or early founding-team experience comfortable in early-stage chaos and high ownership
- Strong product intuition and design sensibility
- Strong SEO / GEO a plus

Tech stack:
- React, Next.js, Postgres

Comp:
- Up to 20% equity

Location:
- Fully remote (Canada, Europe, UK, US)

Apply :
https://matcha.fm/apply/segrowth/hn
by llm_nerd | 2026-02-09 15:01:36+00:00
What made it a disappointment? Over only 9 weeks, which is a very short time for habit changes to take hold, there were measurable, statistically significant effects. And at the highest dose was just 1mg / week for one single week at the end, where the maintenance mode for many is 2.4mg / week.

Seeing such an effect in just 9 weeks, 90% of that time being at low ramp up doses, is astonishing.
by crazygringo | 2026-02-09 15:01:38+00:00
Which is exactly why I said, if you want to ban drones in general then just ban them in general.

It doesn't make any sense to ban them over individual properties. Or to ban them from private properties but allow them over roads.

For now, they're not a problem. If they become one, then we decide what to do about it collectively, democratically.
by nobleach | 2026-02-09 15:01:40+00:00
We can see this effect from Mitchell's own release of his terminal emulator (Ghostty). It was invite-only. The in-crowd on YouTube/Twitter lorded it over others as a status symbol. None of it was based on actual engineering prowess. It was more like, "hey, you speak at conferences and people follow you on social media... you must be amazing".
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-09 15:02:07+00:00
The average tenure of a developer for the longest was 2.5 years not to mention the developer changing teams, even before AI many developers didn’t know how the code they were brought in to maintain works.

> My English instructions do not leave any residual growth. I learn nothing to send back up the chain, and I know nothing of what's below. Why should I exist?

When you use Claude code, tell it to keep a markdown file updated with the what and the why. Instead of just “Do $y”, “Because of $x I need to do $y”. If it is updated in the markdown file, it will be recorded and sometime the agent will come up with code and mske changes that are correct. But use cases you didn’t think about. You can then even ask it “why did it do $x” that you weren’t expecting but oh yeah, it was right.

> Why should I exist?

That’s the wrong question, the correct question is “why is my employer paying me?”. Your employer is paying you to turn well defined requirements into working code to either make them money or to save them money if (the royal) you are a mid level ticket taker. If someone is working at that level, that’s what they are regardless of title.

No one cares if either you or the LLM decided to use a for loop or a while loop.

At higher levels you are responsible for taking your $n number of years of experience to turn more ambiguous, more impactful, larger scoped projects into working implementations that are done on time, on budget and meets requirements. Before LLMs, that meant a combination of my own coding, putting a team together and delegating and telling my director/CTO that this isn’t something we should be doing in house (ie a Salesforce or Workday integration) at all.

Now add to the mix between all those resources - a coding agent. In either case, I as anything above ticket taker, probably haven’t looked at a line of code first. I test for does it meet the functional and non functional requirements and then mostly look at the hot spots - concurrency issues, security issue, and are there any scalability issues that are obvious before I hammer it with real world like traffic - web request or transactions for an ETL job.

And before the pearl clutching starts, I started programming as a hobby in the 80s in assembly and spent the first decade and a half of my career doing C bit twiddling on multiple mainframes, PCs, and later Windows CE devices.
by tom_ | 2026-02-09 15:02:27+00:00
After tweaking the build process to build the same dependencies from source on Linux as on macOS:

x64 Linux build: 1514
x64 Linux test: 307
x64 Linux build/test: 4.93

(Again, not a perfect test, as it still won't be exactly the same code, but the numbers are nevertheless pretty close!)
by teekert | 2026-02-09 15:02:39+00:00
Come on, certainly the "spirit" of the "training" is to learn to disseminate phishing emails from real ones using subtle ques. Not to learn how to write an email filter.

Nowhere am I saying that I agree with the chosen methods, especially not the part that sounds like punishment. But there are better ways to deal with the disagreement than suggested here.
by trpv | 2026-02-09 15:02:50+00:00
It’s not bad UX, it’s part of the experience of driving the car. Something that a Ferrari buyer probably cares more about than a Tesla buyer.
I personally miss the physical keys on older cars that you had to insert and turn to start the car because you’re directly controlling the starter/engine. It feels like you’re driving a car and not using an appliance. There are people who prefer manual transmissions for similar reasons.
Show HN: The Office Lines – Search 60k+ Quotes from the Office (US)
by tranquillanate | 2026-02-09 15:03:05+00:00
I built a search engine for every line of dialogue from The Office (US). It indexes 60,000+ quotes client-side using an inverted index, so search is instant with no backend.

Tech stack: ReScript + React, Vite, Tailwind. The search index is pre-built at compile time and loaded as static JSON. The whole thing runs on GitHub Pages.

Features: fuzzy search, view quotes in context (surrounding dialogue), share quotes, favorites (localStorage), and Amazon affiliate links to watch the episode.
by whizzter | 2026-02-09 15:03:38+00:00
Having done this for a dozen of experiments/toys I fully agree with most of the post, would be nice if the the addition of must_tail attribute could be reliable across the big 3 compilers, but it's not something that can be relied on (luckily Clang seems to be fairly reliable on Windows these days).

2 additional points,

1: The article mentions DWARF, even without it you can use #line directives to give line-numbers in your generated code (and this goes a very long way when debugging), the other part is local variables and their contents.

For variables one can get a good distance by using a C++ subset(a subset that doesn't affect compile time, so avoid any std:: namespaced includes) instead and f.ex. "root/gc/smart" ptr's,etc (depending on language semantics), since the variables will show up in a debugger when you have your #line directives (so "sane" name mangling of output variables is needed).

2: The real sore point of C as a backend is GC, the best GC's are intertwined with the regular stack-frame so normal stack-walking routines also gives everything needed for accuracte GC (required for any moving GC designs, even if more naive generation collectors are possible without it).

Now if you want accurate somewhat fast portable stack-scanning the most sane way currently is to maintain a shadow-stack, where you pass prev-frame ptrs in calls and the prev-frame ptr is a ptr to the end of a flat array that is pre-pended by a magic ptr and the previous prev-frame ptr (forming a linked list with the cost of a few writes, one extra argument with no cleanup cost).

Sadly, the performant linked shadow-stack will obfuscate all your pointers for debugging since they need to be clumped into one array instead of multiple named variables (and restricts you from on-stack complex objects).

Hopefully, one can use the new C++ reflection support for shadow-stacks without breaking compile times, but that's another story.
by hrn_frs | 2026-02-09 15:04:37+00:00
Any attempt at world modeling using today's LLMs needs to have a goal function for the LLM to optimize. The LLM needs to build, evaluate and update it's model of the world. Personally, the main obstacle I found is in updating the model: Data can be large and I think that LLMs aren't good at finding correlations.
by llm_nerd | 2026-02-09 15:05:08+00:00
Yeah, sure (sarcastic). And people mostly use torrents to share Linux distros.

The site/org has no office and is anonymously run virtually. Exists on random, essentially free for all TLDs, does not honour take-down requests, does not respect robots.txt, masquerades as the Googlebot...

...yeah, I happen to have not been born yesterday so I'm not going to play along with a fiction.
by some_random | 2026-02-09 15:05:09+00:00
Look do you think the claim "human life has value" (choosing something uncontroversial that's likely to be a shared foundational belief, feel free to choose something different if you disagree) is a thought terminating cliche? At some point in discourse you will eventually run into foundational beliefs and while they may functionally be terminating thought I think they have to be a different category because they are foundational. It's a first principles thing.
by planb | 2026-02-09 15:05:13+00:00
This article is about people using abstractions without knowing how they work. This is fine. This is how progress is made.

But someone designed the abstraction (e.g. the Wifi driver, the processor, the transistor), and they made sure it works and provides an interface to the layers above.

Now you could say a piece of software completely written by a coding agent is just another abstraction, but the article does not really make that point, so I don't see what message it tries to convey. "I don't understand my wifi driver, so I don't need to understand my code" does not sound like a valid argument.
Ask HN: How do you recover after realizing your OSS v0.1.0 was wrong?
by DennisN21 | 2026-02-09 15:05:40+00:00
I recently shipped v0.1.0 of a small open source project and quickly realized that while it "worked" the architecture and scope were fundamentally wrong.

Instead of stacking fixes, I decided to step back and rebuild it properly toward v1.0.0, with a much stronger focus on simplicity and contributor-friendliness.

I’m curious how others here have handled similar situations:

- When you realize early architectural decisions were wrong, how far back do you roll things?
- How do you balance “learning by building” with not over-engineering?
- At what point does it make sense to invite contributors after a reset?

I’m less interested in validation and more in learning how OSS maintainers think about resets like this.
by ploum | 2026-02-09 15:05:40+00:00
The cache is pure and straight files-in-folders. This makes it trivial to browse the cache by hand:

cd .cache/offpunk/https/news.ycombinator.com/item
cat "id=46943752"

So it could be trivially shared.

The "netcache" tool gives you the cached content or, with --path, returns the path were to find the contentd.

The only point is to preserve the file-modification attribute, which serves to know the age of a cached ressource.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2026-02-09 15:05:54+00:00
That's a very confused reading of thermodynamics, and going from stability landscapes to political systems to literal energy consumption is not a credible leap.

The real problem is psychology, not energy. As soon as you get one predatory narcissist/sociopath in a culture, and they're allowed to act freely, they will, with absolute inevitability, take advantage of everyone else's trust and cooperation and destroy any culture of mutual good will.

Energy is irrelevant to this. It will happen at any level of technology.
by palata | 2026-02-09 15:06:37+00:00
> All of this is really confusing for me.

Yep, I can see that.

The problem with Telegram is that it is not an E2EE messaging platform, period. It is a non-E2EE platform that has an option to encrypt 1:1 messages with a criticised algorithm. Whoever uses Telegram does it for all the nice features that are not E2EE.

> all of a sudden people started claiming it was self evident that "of course Meta can read your WhatsApp messages".

Because some people say stuff like this doesn't make it right. WhatsApp messages are E2EE encrypted, unlike Telegram. There are other things to criticise with WhatsApp, but not that.

> Signal who refused to stop collecting phone numbers until recently even though they never needed it

As you said, you're confused. Signal needed the phone numbers for convenience, so that you could reach your friends. Exactly the same reason as WhatsApp. Could they have done without it? Yes, but maybe Signal would not be as popular. That's a valid tradeoff, and Signal never lied about it. Also having to share your phone number with Signal is still better than any of the other popular platforms. Anything that is "more private" than Signal hasn't managed to get on the map.
by pteraspidomorph | 2026-02-09 15:06:56+00:00
Here's how Discord works. A third or so of its features, such as forum channels (EDIT: I think this specific example was wrong; stage and announcement channels, but not forum channels) or role self-assignment, are locked behind Community Mode. After enabling Community Mode, server owners are NOT ALLOWED to turn off content filtering anymore, meaning that by default, content in every channel may be filtered out by systems you cannot configure.

The only way for the server owner to circumvent the filter is to mark a channel as "NSFW", which doesn't necessarily mean the channel actually contains any NSFW content.

This change will not actually require ID for content confirmed to be NSFW. It will require ID for each and every "NSFW mode" (unfiltered) channel. The end result is that you have three choices:

- Ditch Discord features implemented in recent years (or at least this is currently possible) - this prevents a server from being listed as public;

- Require ID checks from all your users (per channel);

- Have everything scanned from all your users (per channel).
by automatic6131 | 2026-02-09 15:06:56+00:00
Good car interior design fulfills the functions of: usability; sensibility and brand identity. What's good for a LaFerrari (which has many of the same feature on the wheel as this, but imo, better) is not going to be good on a Hyundai i20 and vice versa.

But BMW is, in general, very good at finding a design language that fits all the right buttons in the right places while feeling like a mid-to-up market car. It's a blend of usability and aesthetics and brand (+model) identity that finds a really good balance across all three categories.
by account42 | 2026-02-09 15:07:04+00:00
> However, they do understand price!!! So you end up getting cheap stuff that everyone chooses because they don't understand how they lower their future risk or save money over the long run with a more immediately expensive option.

I think people generally do understand that. What they can't do is tell which of the more expensive options is actually of higher quality and which just has higher margins. That requires expert knowledge and we can't each be an expert in everything.

In other cases it can also actually be better to get the cheaper crap option. E.g. if you are not sure if something will actually work for you the best option is no longer just the one with the lowest cost/lifetime.
by ted_bunny | 2026-02-09 15:07:16+00:00
And if you can't do that, it's not all or nothing. It's not about keeping your soul pure.

Go vegan on weekdays. Or weekends. Or one meal a day. Or do vegetarian instead of vegan.

There are a lot of ways to do a nonzero amount of good, and you may inspire others to do so. And this partial commitment allows you to do so without any adjustment to your lifestyle. You will not suffer a B12 or iron deficiency or whatever else you're worried about. You don't have to eat weird foods you're grossed out by.