MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by casey2 | 2026-02-22 15:29:45+00:00
ironically the structure of x/bluesky, that favors emotive content and echo chambers poisons its own data. You should be wary because the only kinds of people that can use these sites are those that get off on warping their personality to please the mob.

I used to believe most people grew past this ape part of their brain some time between preschool and kindergarten, shortly after you stopped crying while hungry. On X and similarly on Bluesky all users lack emotional development. e.g. Kevin's last post begging people not to hate him. It's feels like walking front door and -50C and the ground is a red desert. You're from mars.

This isn't on corporations or governments to regulate. This isn't on other people to move to your preferred clone. This is on YOU to use better software.

And don't even get me started on the "value" these apps provide

arguably it cheapens engagement and connections.
Say you post that you're going to an event and a follower sees it
1) Since it's easier, the follower didn't need any interest it just popped up in their feed and they decided to go for validation

2) There are 2 phone drones at an event, repeat for everyone that does this now you are at a packed event with people that don't care, locking out the people that do.
by kaydub | 2026-02-22 15:29:47+00:00
Yes to all of these.

Here's the rub, I can spin up multiple agents in separate shells. One is prompted to build out <feature>, following the pattern the author/OP described. Another is prompted to review the plan/changes and keep an eye out for specific things (code smells, non-scalable architecture, duplicated code, etc. etc.). And then another agent is going to get fed that review and do their own analysis. Pass that back to the original agent once it finishes.

Less time, cleaner code, and the REALLY awesome thing is that I can do this across multiple features at the same time, even across different codebases or applications.
by Joker_vD | 2026-02-22 15:30:23+00:00
> There will always be a strong belief in artificially changing market behaviour by simply throwing money at it and hoping it sticks.

Well, it can be made to work, you know. Late (in the XX century) industrialization stories are like that: competitive (dis)advantages make any such attempts simply unprofittable for any businessman (or even a group of them), but if the government keeps skewing the market for decades... The Japanese car manufacturing has been heavily subsidized for most of the XX century, even after their several disastrous attempts to enter the US market. But it all worked out in the end.
by steveBK123 | 2026-02-22 15:31:09+00:00
> Nothing beats the pressure of using a language all day in a place where they don’t speak your language.

Nothing beats immersion I'd agree. I found self-studying very difficult because sure I could try and read or listen, but I had no one to really judge my writing/speaking responses back. Or you learn how to speak like a textbook written in the 80s.

> I also find that I can speak far better than I can listen.

I had the same problem when traveling with a non-fluent understanding of the local language. It logically makes sense though - you only need to learn 1 way to say a thing, but theres 100s of ways for someone to respond to you.

> Folks regularly compliment me on my pronunciation

Conjugation/grammar & pronunciation go a long way. You can fill in vocabulary gaps by reaching for similar enough words, describing the thing, or offering up the English word for the thing and get there often... provided you can place it within a decently constructed sentence.

I also find knowing the local way of saying umm/uhh helps a lot so people understand you are slowing down/thinking/struggling for the right words.
by selridge | 2026-02-22 15:31:31+00:00
I’ll give you a real concrete example. I had to build an app on the Mac, which needed to be signed. I did not want to learn Apple signing procedures in order to do this. It turns out I did not have to, because I got the robot to learn it. So then I was able to finish doing what it was I intended to do without having to spend an afternoon or a day misunderstanding the Apple signing procedures.

Could I have learned these and become a more virtuous person by knowing apples signing rules? Maybe. What’s much more likely is that I might’ve just stopped doing this rather than deal with that particular difficulty. Instead, I was able to work on other problems that arose in the building of this application.

What I am suggesting to you is that I don’t have to fucking feel bad for being daunted anymore. And neither does anyone else. Folks that want to do that on their own time are free to, but I’m never going back.

There’s a lot of projects for people where this is gonna start to be the operative situation. Folks who might have gotten stuck on an early stumbling block are now just moving ahead and are learning about different and frankly more interesting problems to solve. I’m still beating my head on things, but they are not. “did I get this format just right?”

This shift is an analogous to how we took having to do computer arithmetic out of the hands of programmers in the 80s. There used to be a substantial part of programming that was just a computer arithmetic. Now, almost nobody does that. Nobody in this thread could build a full adder if their life depended on it or produce an accurate sin function. It used to be that that would’ve stopped you cold and trying to answer an engineering problem on a computer. Now it doesn’t. We do not run around telling people that they’re not engineers or that they’re not learning because we have made this affordance.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-22 15:31:48+00:00
I do not know which is the difference, but you really feel a difference.

It might be of homogeneity, i.e. the FreeBSD tools behave in a consistent way, while there are significant differences between the Linux tools, depending on which were the opinions of their particular authors about how the traditional UNIX tools should be changed.

For instance, at some point in time, long ago, in Linux the traditional "ifconfig" and a few related commands have been replaced by "ip", for managing networking.

The Linux "ifconfig" needed an upgrade, as it could do only a small fraction of what the FreeBSD "ifconfig" could do. Nevertheless, until today, decades later, I have been unable to stop hating the Linux "ip".

I cannot say why, because in other cases when some command-line or GUI utility that I had used for many years was replaced by an alternative I instantly recognized that the new UI was better and I never wanted to use the old UI again.

So while both FreeBSD and Linux have started with the same traditional UNIX utilities, they have evolved divergently and now they frequently feel quite differently, in the sense that the various options in commands or in configuration files may match your expectations only when taking into account the identity of the OS. Overall FreeBSD has been more conservative, but there are also cases when it has made bigger changes, but such changes seem more carefully planned and less haphazard than in the Linux world.
Show HN: Tlsctl – A CLI for inspecting and troubleshooting TLS
by _smertens_ | 2026-02-22 15:32:31+00:00
Hi,

I built tlsctl, a small CLI for inspecting, testing, and debugging TLS connections:

https://github.com/catay/tlsctl

It aims to make TLS diagnostics more readable and structured than stitching together `openssl` and other ad-hoc commands.
You can inspect certificates and chains, check protocol support, and output in different formats.

Part of the motivation was practical (I got tired of parsing `openssl s_client` output), and part was educational.
I wanted to build more hands-on experience with agentic engineering workflows.
Shout out to https://ampcode.com/ for their coding agent.

I’d love feedback on usefulness, missing features, and whether this fits into real-world TLS troubleshooting workflows.

Thanks!

Steven
by NegativeK | 2026-02-22 15:32:42+00:00
Excepting small communities: if you're looking for anything but humor, sort by best typically ruins the comments.

Subreddits get jokes or noob content going to the top.

PBS's Spacetime channel on Youtube -- one of the few channels with a budget to go into more depth (as in, not afraid to show you some math) on science -- has three types of comments at the top: jokes, thanks to the algorithm, and commenters saying they're too dumb to understand the video.

Political posts here on HN end up with the attention getting rhetoric going to the top.
by gingerBill | 2026-02-22 15:32:52+00:00
I tried my best to be very clear within this article that I am talking about two specific things: DECLARATION SYNTAX and SEMICOLONS. This does not extend to anything else. In fact I got so frustrated with people like yourself who are wrongly interpreting the article that way and extrapolating too much that I had to write a new article: https://www.gingerbill.org/article/2026/02/21/does-syntax-ma...

"Does Syntax Matter?" And the first one is "Yes."

And all languages can have their declaration syntaxes categorized into one of the three I mention. This is not limited to ALGOLs. And I have come across "really interesting language syntax". I am not talking about that in this article.

----

Ergonomics does matter and it's not just about optimizing for typing either. It's actually all about coherency and consistency, something I go into depth into the following article on syntax.

----

I am not "conflating" a semicolon with statement terminators, I am using that as shorthand as most languages that most people encounter (not all languages, obviously) will use semicolons. Python's approach to parsing is a form of automatic semicolon insertion, even if most people don't think of it that way.

----

And I do not like Python's approach requiring significant whitespace of "blocks" through indentation. I much prefer using something like braces, or an `end` keyword, etc, literally because it prevents the problems that significant whitespace introduces. I am not getting into that argument here; please don't start it.
Show HN: Semantic search over Hacker News, built on pgvector
by stranger90 | 2026-02-22 15:33:10+00:00
I built https://ask.rivestack.io — a semantic search engine over Hacker News posts. Instead of keyword matching, it finds results by meaning, so you can search things like "best way to handle authentication in microservices" and get relevant threads even if they don't contain those exact words.
How it works:

Indexed HN posts and comments into PostgreSQL with pgvector (HNSW index)
Embeddings generated with OpenAI's embedding model
Queries run as nearest-neighbor vector searches — typical response under 50ms
The whole thing runs on a single Postgres instance, no separate vector DB

I built this partly because I wanted a better way to search HN, and partly to dogfood my own project — Rivestack (https://rivestack.io), a managed PostgreSQL service with pgvector baked in. I wanted to see how pgvector holds up with a real dataset at a reasonable scale.
A few things I learned along the way:

HNSW vs IVFFlat matters a lot at this scale. HNSW gave me much better recall with acceptable index build times.
Storing embeddings alongside relational data in the same DB simplifies things enormously — no syncing between a vector store and your main DB.
pgvector has gotten surprisingly fast in recent versions. For most use cases, you really don't need a dedicated vector database.

The search is free to use. Rivestack has a free tier too if anyone wants to try something similar.
Happy to answer questions about the architecture, pgvector tuning, or anything else.
by c0nsumer | 2026-02-22 15:33:34+00:00
Outside of security stuff, over the years I've found this really handy for troubleshooting as well. Being able to extract detailed process info, screenshots, and a bunch of other things from a memory dump have allowed me to get a better idea of what a user was doing when a Windows BSOD occurred.

It builds more a nice picture of what was going on when paired with the users description. Or sometimes, depending on the user, you just don't have anything else to go on besides "it crashed".
by Betelbuddy | 2026-02-22 15:34:16+00:00
You mean France's New Caledonia who already had three! referendums, and three times voted to remain part of France and has a new one planned for 2026? That one?

Or is it something else going on there?

When China knocks at the door of New Caledonia - https://www.aspi.org.au/report/when-china-knocks-door-new-ca...
by cess11 | 2026-02-22 15:34:30+00:00
This is the first time I've seen this way to show that Q does not have a higher cardinality than N, is it a common method?

I don't remember exactly how I learned about it in high school, infinity cardinalities have rarely come up since then, but it was some other method or at least another form of presentation, i.e. symbols and prose.
by gingerBill | 2026-02-22 15:35:05+00:00
I was trying to be EXTREMELY clear I am talking specifically about DECLARATION syntax only and how for the most part, the concrete syntax for the DECLARTAION syntax is not that important in many languages.

However concrete syntax matters a heck of a lot and cannot be trivially interchangeable.

I had to write a follow-up article to clarify this because of people like yourself wrongly interpreting the article: https://www.gingerbill.org/article/2026/02/21/does-syntax-ma...
by vampiregrey | 2026-02-22 15:35:26+00:00
Hey HN,

I’ve been building Solidclaw, a small local credential broker + model proxy for OpenClaw.

I started it because I was increasingly uncomfortable with:

API keys living in random .env files

Provider keys sitting inside OpenClaw configs

Tool secrets bundled directly into plugins

Credentials duplicated across services

It felt messy and fragile — especially when experimenting with multiple providers and tools.

So Solidclaw sits in front and handles:

Keeping provider keys out of OpenClaw

Isolating tool secrets

Scoping model access via tokens

Injecting secrets only at runtime

The idea is simple: clean separation between orchestration and secrets.
Less key sprawl. Smaller blast radius. More explicit access control.

It’s very early stage and evolving fast. I’m iterating based on real usage while building AI infra tools.

If you're working with OpenClaw — or generally building local-first AI infra — I’d genuinely appreciate feedback, criticism, or ideas.

Happy to share architecture details if there’s interest.
by its-a-new-world | 2026-02-22 15:35:41+00:00
Last year I built an AI agent with standard tools for things like file access. However, I noticed that I wanted to give the user a richer experience, I wanted to show clear diffs when the LLM proposed changes, I wanted to allow the user to view the file system as a whole without having to switch to another tool or cobble together an alternative view that matched the tool configuration.

However, this forced me to go outside the standard specifications for such tools and build a custom solution for my specific agent.

In the MCP4H proposal I have tried to bring that UI power to a standard MCP server by layering some additional (optional) features on top of it.

It is inspired by MCP Apps and uses some MCP v2 features to offer complex visualization on top of the standard tools aimed at the LLM.

Note that it is entirely opt-in and the MCP file server I added as an example can be used as a standard MCP server as well.

In addition to the UI components, I have added a standardized "dryrun" proposition using the new "_meta" fields. This can use the visualization to better inform the user of what he might be agreeing to. I've also added a permission model example that tries to balance ease of use with detailed permission management.
by skybrian | 2026-02-22 15:36:02+00:00
Good article.

It seems like a consequence is that publicity outside Iran is only going to be effective to the extent that it mobilizes people inside Iran?

(With the possible exception of getting Trump's attention, but I don't think air strikes are going to do it?)

And the government of Iran seems very willing to kill people.

I don't see this ending well.
by close04 | 2026-02-22 15:36:36+00:00
The theory is always easy. The role of agitators since the beginning of times was to preempt the premise of “non-violence”. They will infiltrate a protest and fire the first shots in the most visible way possible to justify a reaction in force. The controlled media will focus on those images, protesters throwing molotovs, firing guns, attacking law enforcement.

That recipe is the theory of the ideal case. If it were that simple authoritarian regimes would be a thing of the past. But those regimes have played the game longer than most protesters have been alive. That’s why these movements barely make a dent even with covert outside support.
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2026-02-22 15:37:00+00:00
Bloomberg News is at least 2 organizations (and maybe 3+ now).

The original Bloomberg News was purely financial. They then bought Businessweek and published Bloomberg Businessweek but also leveraged the acquisition to build out their general news under the Bloomberg News banner. They’ve had other acquisitions as well to expand their scope. The one I’m particularly interested in is Citylab which means they have probably some of the best urbanism and housing policy related news coverage.
by magicmicah85 | 2026-02-22 15:37:07+00:00
The funny thing about the friends feed is that it highlights for me who is extremely active on the platform. People resharing stuff all the time. And, it's one of the few feeds you can't endlessly scroll through. It will tell you to "check back later" once you get to 3-4 days of updates. No money in showing people their friends feeds, so why let them endlessly scroll.
by washadjeffmad | 2026-02-22 15:37:10+00:00
I still enjoy those, because they're very true to the era. How many of us learned html by viewing source and copying bits from the sites we liked with no clearer vision than "I want that on my site, too!"?

To me, _any_ non-commercial human expression on the web is heartening, even if it lacks authenticity or taste. We've all been ruled by the effects of overreach of adtech for far too long.
by kurouna | 2026-02-22 15:37:18+00:00
That is a very fair question. When I say "lightweight," I am focusing on perceived speed and responsiveness rather than memory footprint.

Here is how I approached it in elecxzy:

Core Implementation: I implemented the core editor logic, including a custom Piece Table and Virtual Rendering, from scratch. By keeping everything outside of Electron itself as minimal and simple as possible, the editor remains very snappy.

No Extensions or Lisp: Since it doesn't have a Lisp environment or an extension system, the startup process is very straightforward. While it might not be as instant as the native Notepad, it is as fast as a simple, optimized Electron app can be.

I made a quick video comparing its startup speed with Notepad. The post is in Japanese, but you can see how quickly it launches in the video:
https://x.com/elecxzy/status/2022003439757336583

For me, the goal was to ensure that the input latency and the feeling of opening the app don't hinder the "flow" of taking quick notes.
by cowboylowrez | 2026-02-22 15:37:56+00:00
I like facebook but its got some irritating features. I view the feed a little bit, but I also have specific folks bookmarked. If facebook breaks bookmarks then yeah I doubt I could use it, I already can't bookmark conversations I've participated in unless I explicitely use a facebook feature (share, save or something) and if comments get beyond a few dozen I forget the "thread" as it becomes unusable. Things like telegram and signal (?) need apps apparently, never bothered with those.

I suspect the monetary incentives are at cross purposes to my personal incentives. Reddit really has a much nicer experience if you have good internet and several hundred cores but I don't have either, if the "old" reddit goes away I would need some serious upgrades to use it, wierd that they're worse than facebook with their new ui.

Imgur, instagram has no usable interface for me, x is now exclusively the realm of degenerates and whackjobs, I have never once sucessfully loaded a discord page so won't even be affected by their id grab.

there are still a few cool places here and there. I think some smaller sites with similar interfaces to old reddit, hacker news (but with subs) have potential.
Show HN: A developer portfolio that tracks real recruiter engagement
by portlumeai | 2026-02-22 15:38:54+00:00
I built a portfolio platform that turns GitHub activity into a live profile with analytics.

Some things it does:

Auto sync GitHub projects

Show real recruiter views and repo clicks

Generate ATS friendly resumes

Email based job application tracking

The analytics part came from frustration. Traditional portfolios show static work but give no feedback loop.

Now users can see which projects actually get attention and optimize accordingly.

The email tracking feature works by forwarding job emails to a generated address. The system parses replies and updates application status automatically.

Built mostly with Node, Mongo, and a bunch of background workers for parsing and sync.

Would love feedback from the HN crowd, especially around positioning and whether analytics belongs in portfolios.
by dataflow | 2026-02-22 15:39:28+00:00
> Not that I'm a political activist, but I'm constantly disturbed that all my friends who posted non-stop about supporting Palestine have NEVER made one mention of supporting the Iranians protesting that regime.

There are many extremely significant differences between the situations Iranians and Palestinians have been in. The only similarity you seem to be looking at is the number of reported deaths, it seems. But Iranians and Palestinians have emphatically not been in even remotely comparable situations for the past half-century.

Not claiming a bias is necessarily absent or present. Just that there are many rather obvious explanations for the discrepancy you're noting besides that.
by mcswell | 2026-02-22 15:39:38+00:00
To be technical: the term is phonemic, not phonetic. If we spelled phonetically, we'd have different symbols for the p in 'spin' and the p+h in 'pin'. Similarly for 'tick' and 'stick', and 'scale' and 'kale'. Native English speakers generally don't notice the differences, just like speakers of many oriental languages don't easily recognize the difference between English /l/ and /r/.
by gabrieledarrigo | 2026-02-22 15:39:38+00:00
Does anyone still write code?
I use agents to iterate on one task in parallel, with an approach similar to this one: https://mitchellh.com/writing/my-ai-adoption-journey#today

But I'm starting to have an identity crisis: am I doing it wrong, and should I use an agent to write any line of code of the product I'm working on?

Have I become a dinosaur in the blink of an eye?

Should I just let it go and accept that the job I was used to not only changed (which is fine), but now requires just driving the output of a machine, with no creative process at all?