MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Jinjatest – type-safe tests and branch coverage for Jinja templates
by demoonkevin | 2026-02-06 23:44:33+00:00
Hi HN — I’m Kevin. As many of you, I've been using Jinja templates to render LLM prompts, where subtle bugs can introduce unexpected LLM behavior that is hard to debug. And writing unit tests to prevent those bugs is painful: you end up doing assertions against raw strings, which is brittle and forces you to keep track of format changes, etc.

So I built jinjatest: a Python library + pytest plugin that lets you test Jinja templates with structure, and (the part I haven’t seen elsewhere) get branch coverage reports for templates.

What it does:

- Template branch coverage via runtime instrumentation: pytest --jt-cov, fail-under thresholds, and term/html/json/xml reports

- Type-safe render context validation with Pydantic + StrictUndefined by default (missing vars fail loudly)

- Parse rendered output as JSON/YAML/XML/markdown "(including fenced code blocks) so tests can assert on structured data

- Optional anchors/traces inside templates for section-level assertions / verifying branches were taken

Open to feedback!
by agumonkey | 2026-02-06 23:44:38+00:00
I get crazy over the 'engineer are not paid to write loc', nobody is sad because they don't have to type anymore. My two issues are it levels the delivery game, for the average web app, anybody can now output something acceptable, and then it doesn't help me conceptualize solution better, so I revert to letting it produce stuff that is not maleable enough.
by detourdog | 2026-02-06 23:44:39+00:00
I enjoy these types of documents that layout the issue. I was surprised by the description of the shortcomings of composites. I understand carbon fiber may be prone to the dielectric corrosion but the other fabrics he mentioned should be immune. The repairability should be straight forward and joining metals is pretty common. Fabrics in composites use different weaves and are laid up with different orientations depending on anticipated stressing. My experience with composites is in boat building and it’s limited but growing. I’m currently a novice but plan on pushing composite construction as far as I can. I’m not saying he is wrong but I’m surprised at the criticism of composites.
by wolvoleo | 2026-02-06 23:45:51+00:00
Yeah I love that about living in a European City. I don't even own a car and haven't driven one for 8 years now. I hope I'll never need one again. There's stores, restaurants, a laundromat all within 2 minutes walk. The subway is 5-10 minutes (3 different lines with different walking times)

Additionally I spend so much less on transport and no longer waste time driving. When I'm riding public transport I can read stuff. I don't see any negatives.
by 9dev | 2026-02-06 23:46:02+00:00
> AI just means more output will be expected of you, and they'll keep pushing you to work as hard as you can.

That’s a bit too cynical for me. After all, yes, your boss is not paying you for sipping lattes, but for producing value for the company. If there is a tool that maximises your output, why wouldn’t he want you to use that to great efficiency?

Put differently, would a carpenter shop accept employees rejecting the power saw in favour of a hand saw to retain their artisanal capability?
by piskov | 2026-02-06 23:46:21+00:00
Can we please make as little js as possible?

Why would one drag this god forsaken abomination on server-side is beyond me.

Even effing C# nowdays can be run in script-like manner from a single file.

—

Even the latest Codex UI app is Electron. The one that is supposed to write itself with AI wonders but couldn’t manage native swiftui, winui, and qt or whatever is on linux this days.
by lucb1e | 2026-02-06 23:46:21+00:00
Wow, it both surprises me but also makes me feel justified in that I keep telling people to make backups of things they care about including something like a Spotify account (if your song lists are dear to them, at least the titles and other metadata that they could rebuild from) and other "cloud" or SaaS services. Anything one cares about, back it up! (Not to you but as a PSA)

Still, it's weird that Google doesn't accept a recovery code. Then again, I had a similar issue where I had nothing set up but a recovery email address and password (back when 2FA was rare), and after confirming both, Google said "well, we still think it's suspicious, why don't you use a device where you're already logged in" (my account had no active sessions that I knew of, besides that I was traveling). Luckily I didn't need it for anything as I had my email moved away already at that time. I still can't access that account today and I switched to throwaway accounts for things like youtube comments or app downloads from the play store (need to download that government authentication software somehow...)

Did Google specifically reject the recovery code as invalid, or did it accept all entries and then their algorithm rejected the login outright?
by cratermoon | 2026-02-06 23:47:13+00:00
I'm a fan of "Thunder, Perfect Mind"

I am the knowledge of my inquiry,
and the finding of those who seek after me,
and the command of those who ask of me,
and the power of the powers in my knowledge
of the angels, who have been sent at my word,
and of gods in their seasons by my counsel,
and of spirits of every man who exists with me,
and of women who dwell within me.
I am the one who is honored, and who is praised,
and who is despised scornfully.
I am peace,
and war has come because of me.
And I am an alien and a citizen.
by IshKebab | 2026-02-06 23:48:25+00:00
Sure but most of the world has a density low enough that cars work and trains don't really. I like trains as much as the next nerd, but you're never going to be able to take a train from your house to your local farm shop or whatever.

Where trains work they are great. Where they don't, driverless electric cars seem like a great option.
by k310 | 2026-02-06 23:48:52+00:00
> A senior WH official tells me: A White House staffer erroneously made the post.

> Newsom’s office jumped on the admission, posting “WOW! WHITE HOUSE SAYS TRUMP DOESN’T WRITE HIS OWN TWEETS??? AUTOPEN!” and included an A.I. image featuring an autopen writing a social media post in Trump’s name.

Source: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/autopen-newsom-skewers-t...
by GoatInGrey | 2026-02-06 23:49:07+00:00
> most people don't want to use

I'm not sure if this was intended or not, but this is a common NIMBY refrain. The argument of "This thing being advocated for that I'm fighting against isn't something people want anyway". And like walkable neighborhood architecture, extremely few Americans have access to light rail. Let alone light rail that doesn't have to yield to car traffic.

Regardless, the cost arguments fall apart once you take the total cost society pays for each system instead of only what the government pays. Because when you get the sum of road construction & maintenance, car acquisition, car maintenance, insurance, and parking, it dwarfs the cost of the local transit system. Break it down on a per-consumer basis and it gets even uglier. New York City is a good example to dive into, especially since it's the typical punching bag for "out-of-control" budgets.

Quick napkin math pins the annual MTA cost at $32-$33 billion and the total cost of the car system between $25 and $44 billion per year. Since the former serves somewhere around 5.5 million riders, and the latter only about 2 million, the MTA costs $5,300-6,600 per user annually where the car system costs $12,000–$22,500 per user annually.
by icegreentea2 | 2026-02-06 23:50:27+00:00
You can go to the "nations report card" and play around with the NAEP score stats: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/mathematics/scores-per...

For me, two things pop out in particular.

Firstly, in math, if you look at how the percentiles break down, it seems clear that while there an overall drop in performance from 2020-2023, it also seems clear to that the top end of doing relatively ok. For example, at the 75th percentile, the we are basically flat from 2008 to 2020 (before dropping in 2023) - 2008: 305, 2012: 309, 2020: 307, 2023: 301 (net -4). This contrasts with the median which went from 2008: 283, 2012: 287, 2020: 282, 2023: 274 (net -9).

This implies to me that whatever flaws are in the overall system (at least pre COVID), the top end was relatively durable.

Secondly, if you go the "student group scores" section and click through all of the different sub-groupings, the only group that looks to have an overall flat score at all is "Private: Catholic".

I think the combination of the upper end being pretty durable, as well as the higher scores in the only "self selecting" category in the dataset may support what a lot of people tend to grumble about - the distribution of domestic situations is not favorable.
by rietta | 2026-02-06 23:50:31+00:00
This has been a source I’ve referred to on and off for years. It’s really interesting to read some things that don’t show up in our everyday Bible. Including things that were considered not canon by the early church. I enjoyed reading the translation of the Shepherds of Hermas. It was not the easiest to follow, but in a sense it was a very popular allegory like Pilgrim’s Progress was centuries later!
by pier25 | 2026-02-06 23:51:57+00:00
My biggest issue with Figma and most vector apps is how they handle groups. Only Illustrator seems to offer group isolation. You can double click on a group, enter the group and just edit the elements inside that group.

It's such a simple feature but it massively improves the workflow of working with vectors. Never understood why Figma, Sketch, or Affinity Designer never implemented it.
by Wuzzy | 2026-02-06 23:53:01+00:00
I believe in an MCP-less future of agent-service interactions and have recently submitted this general alternative (which also supports Slack) based on curl: https://github.com/imbue-ai/latchkey

With that said, a specialized tool like this will almost certainly work better if Slack is the only service you want your agents to interact with. I like that the auth is transparent.
by api | 2026-02-06 23:53:23+00:00
I’ve always seen American evangelism as a political movement first and a religious one second.

This impression has strengthened quite a bit in recent years as it’s become clear that political movements and politicians that are diametrically opposed to the teachings of Jesus are perfectly okay if they align on other more immediate secular political issues.

There’s always been a claim that the US is an outlier compared to other developed nations in terms of religiosity. I don’t really believe this anymore. I think we have a lot of politics with heavy religious veneer, but if you look only at sincere belief in the tenets of a faith I don’t think the US is much more religious than the UK for example.
by WinstonSmith84 | 2026-02-06 23:53:26+00:00
I used Heroku extensively before AWS reached its current level of maturity. Heroku made it incredibly easy to create cool apps. When Salesforce acquired it, and knowing a lot about Salesforce, I expected tight integration to address use cases where Apex is too limited (Apex being Salesforce's native language). There were (and still are) numerous such use cases. Unfortunately, this never materialized, and Salesforce gradually shifted away from a dev-first platform toward click-based config and heavy reliance on middleware for all kind of integrations.

It's been a butchered acquisition and missed opportunities along the way. And now it ends up just like Microsoft's Skype.
by kgraves | 2026-02-06 23:53:42+00:00
Try lobsters and probably Reddit which have a hard stance against AI.

You're right in HN heading down in favouring slop, constant posts and startups about AI with now 'influencers' (simonw in particular) aggressively posting and shilling AI.

With the moderators knowing that these 'influencers' and their kind violate the HN guidelines every day by purposefully linking back to their site for farming backlinks.

It might as well be called AI news.
by ikjasdlk2234 | 2026-02-06 23:53:49+00:00
Domain is all government, but the tech is different across each of them.

I love talking too, part of why I think pre-sales is a lot of fun. And I actually love my CRM work from a data perspective, but my background is in synthesizing data and optimization. Once I turned my sales process into a network optimizing problem, it became extremely interesting to me and imperative to keep the data current.
by tzs | 2026-02-06 23:53:57+00:00
Careful looking at their graphs. If you don't keep in mind that they are showing changes you could get a wrong impression. For example on the page they link to to get data from every state, https://edunomicslab.org/roi-over-time/ , it shows the graphs for Massachusetts and Mississippi side by side.

In Massachusetts 8th grade math is down about 17 points. In Mississippi math down about 2 points. (I'm using 2022 scores).

That could give the impression that math scores are higher in Mississippi since the math line on the Massachusetts graph is way lower than the corresponding line on the Mississippi graph.

But the actual scores those years were 284 for Massachusetts and 268 for Mississippi.
Show HN: Webapps running in Docker containers and earning on token margins
by cryptoz | 2026-02-06 23:54:00+00:00
Hello! I hope this is sufficiently different to pique your interest:

1) I use Abstract Syntax Trees to have the LLM modify existing code. It will make more targeted changes than I've seen compared to codex/gemini cli/cursor etc. I wrote a blog post about how I do this if you want to know more: https://codeplusequalsai.com/static/blog/prompting_llms_to_m...

2) I double-charge for tokens. This creates a margin, so that when you publish your app, you get to earn from that extra token margin. An API call that costs $0.20 to the user would break down to $0.10 for the LLM provider, $0.08 for you, and $0.02 for me. I'm trying to reduce the friction of validating ideas by making the revenue happen automatically as people use your app.

3) I've built a "Marketplace" where you can browse the webapps people have created: https://codeplusequalsai.com/marketplace

I'm kind of trying to bring back and old-school web vibe into the AI world, where it's easier for people to create things and also discover neat little sites people have built. I wonder if I can also solve the 'micropayments' idea that never took off really, by baking in the revenue model to your webapp.

4) I envision the future of large-scale software development to be a lot more about writing clear tickets than ever before; we've all dealt with poorly-written tickets, ill-defined use cases, and ambiguous requirements. This site is an early take on what I think the UX might be in a future where ticket-writing may take a greater amount of time, especially to code-writing.

What do you think?

--

Some more quick nerdy details about behind-the-scenes tech: this is running on 3 linode servers: 1 app server (python/flask), 1 db server (postgres), 1 'docker server' that hosts your webapps. The hardest part about making this was getting the LLMs to write the AST code, and setting up the infrastructure to run it. I have a locked-down docker with python and node, and once the LLM responds to a code change request we run a script in that docker to get the new output. For example, to change an html file, it runs a python script that inputs the original file contents as a string to the LLM output, which uses beautifulsoup to make changes to the html file as requested by the user. It's quite custom to each language, so at the moment I support Python, Javascript, HTML, CSS and am currently testing React/Typescript (with moderate success!)
by observationist | 2026-02-06 23:54:24+00:00
I suspect we're going to need hypernetworks of some sort - dynamically generated weights, with the hypernet weights getting the dream-like reconsolidation and mapping into the model at large, and layers or entire experts generated from the hypernets on the fly, a degree removed from the direct-from-weights inference being done now. I've been following some of the token-free latent reasoning and other discussions around CoT, other reasoning scaffolding, and so forth, and you just can't overcome the missing puzzle piece problem elegantly unless you have online memory. In the context of millions of concurrent users, that also becomes a nightmare. Having a pipeline, with a sort of intermediate memory, constructive and dynamic to allow resolution of problems requiring integration into memorized concepts and functions, but held out for curation and stability.

It's an absolutely enormous problem, and I'm excited that it seems to be one of the primary research efforts kicking off this year. It could be a very huge capabilities step change.
by joshuamorton | 2026-02-06 23:54:25+00:00
It's worth noting that, at least for bart, the reason that it is facing bankruptcy is precisely because it was mostly rider supported and profitable, and not government supported.

When ridership plummeted by >50% during the pandemic, fixed costs stayed the same, but income dropped. Last time I checked, if Bart ridership returned to 2019 levels, with no other changes, it would be profitable again.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-06 23:54:42+00:00
And you still for B2B SaaS have to worry about:

1. Where does this fit in Gartner’s Magic Square? No one ever got fired for buying Salesforce/ServiceNow/Workday/well known company

2. “What if I don’t need feature $x now. But I might need it in the future?”

3. “Everyone in my industry already knows how to use $x, so it will be easier to onboard new employees”

In today’s world for any SaaS to be taken seriously, it has to have Slack/Teams integration and SSO logins with the company’s IDP - there is an industry standard so if you support one, it’s relatively painless to support all of them. So what is your enterprise sales story?

Even if you work at a company that gives everyone a yearly stipend to get almost anything they want that will improve your work, you still have to get approval for any tool where the company’s info is sent to a third party.

These are all things that most people don’t think about when they want to turn their passion product into a business
by ssl-3 | 2026-02-06 23:54:43+00:00
In the old-web days, I just used wget with slow pacing (and by "pacing" I mean: I don't need it to be done today or even this week, so if it takes a rather long time then that's fine. Slow helped keep me from mucking up the latency on my dial-up connection, too.)

I don't think that's being a dick for old-web sites that still exist today. Most of the information is text, the photos tend to be small, it's all generally static (ie, light-weight to serve), and the implicit intent is for people to use it.

But it's pretty slow-moving, so getting it from archive.org would probably suffice if being zero-impact is the goal.

(Or, you know: Just email the dude that runs it like it's 1998 again, say hi, and ask. In this particular instance, it's still being maintained.)
by lucb1e | 2026-02-06 23:54:44+00:00
My password manager has, *checks*, precisely 900 entries. Say that I care about maybe ten percent, that's still doing a "drill" on every single weekend day of the year

Security aspects of software should just work properly. Google should test this and, imo, people should make backups of data they care about. Google might ban you for any reason, no matter if the recovery drill worked 2 hours ago it might not work anymore now. Seems like a fool's errand to keep chasing it instead of making routine (or automated) backups of the things you're still using
by ianbutler | 2026-02-06 23:55:10+00:00
Had you said this first instead of the snark I would have had a more reasonable initial reply just fyi.

My intent wasn't to pat myself on the back it was to make OP aware people have not all just been going along with it using myself as an example, and then it turned into a nice little side thread with me and the OP talking about that conceptually.

I can appreciate you disagree with how I chose to go about that though as objectively it was self centered.
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-02-06 23:55:37+00:00
I'm holding off on 7 myself. I think they deviated too hard from the formula such that it doesn't look like it's even still a Civ game. And while I'm open-minded enough to try it, I wasn't going to drop $70 on a game I had reason to suspect I would dislike. I figured I would wait until it was on game pass, or on sale for $5 someday.

More recently I read that they are going to update the game such that you don't have to switch civs. That's a good start (though I still don't think I will like the era system at all), but reading the initial reviews a year ago I found out that the game cuts off abruptly in the mid 20th century, rather than going to the information age like normal. To me, that is blatantly unfinished, so I'm not planning to get the game until they fix that as well.
by mullingitover | 2026-02-06 23:56:13+00:00
Their unreleased LaMDA[1] famously caused one of their own engineers to have a public crashout in 2022, before ChatGPT dropped. Pre-ChatGPT they also showed it off in their research blog[2] and showed it doing very ChatGPT-like things and they alluded to 'risks,' but those were primarily around it using naughty language or spreading misinformation.

I think they were worried that releasing a product like ChatGPT only had downside risks for them, because it might mess up their money printing operation over in advertising by doing slurs and swears. Those sweet summer children: little did they know they could run an operation with a seig-heiling CEO who uses LLMs to manufacture and distribute CSAM worldwide, and it wouldn't make above-the-fold news.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaMDA#Sentience_claims

[2] https://research.google/blog/lamda-towards-safe-grounded-and...