MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by order-matters | 2026-02-25 14:59:36+00:00
i work in cost and pricing, and while i see the allure of AI helping out with it and I would love to be able to hand it over and work on other things, i feel like so much of this work involves things outside the sandbox.

Take price fairness, for example. i feel like the human part is core to this work. it ultimately all comes down to a test of reasonableness. A wide brush for costs is sometimes used because it keeps things trackable by the humans involved. An AI is able to generate an amount of work thats unreasonable to verify. At the end of the day, pricing is a negotiation not a logic puzzle.

If it does work though, i think it could open a huge door for Cost Plus Fixed Fee contracts which seem like the fairest contract type but often come with too much burden of paper work compared to the more popular firm fixed price option
by Xeoncross | 2026-02-25 15:00:08+00:00
This is why I jumped from PHP to Go, then why I jumped from Go to Rust.

Go is the most battery-included language I've ever used. Instant compile times means I can run tests bound to ctrl/cmd+s every time I save the file. It's more performant (way less memory, similar CPU time) than C# or Java (and certainly all the scripting languages) and contains a massive stdlib for anything you could want to do. It's what scripting languages should have been. Anyone can read it just like Python.

Rust takes the last 20% I couldn't get in a GC language and removes it. Sure, it's syntax doesn't make sense to an outsider and you end up with 3rd party packages for a lot of things, but can't beat it's performance and safety. Removes a whole lot of tests as those situations just aren't possible.

If Rust scares you use Go. If Go scares you use Rust.
by amirjavid | 2026-02-25 15:00:28+00:00
Hi HN, I'm the builder behind QuoteDefender.

I got frustrated by the wall of numbers at car dealerships and realized that standard lease calculators often miss the subtle, iterative math that dealers use to bake in profit. So, I built an engine to completely reverse-engineer dealer paperwork.

The core issue isn't necessarily that dealers lie; it's that they use complex, perfectly legal math (like marking up the Money Factor or capitalizing taxes differently by state) to obscure the true cost. To prove the model works, I spent the last few months running real dealer quotes—like a Mercedes GLC 300 in Louisiana (stream tax) vs. a Lexus TX 350 in Georgia (capitalized tax)—through the engine.

In every case, it back-calculates the exact Net Capitalized Cost, separates the interest rate markup from the captive lender's buy rate, and verifies the monthly payment to the exact cent.

I’ve detailed the math and methodology in the link, and you can run your own lease numbers through the live tool.

I’d love for this community to stress-test the app, poke holes in my tax logic, or let me know if I'm missing any obscure local fee structures. Happy to answer any questions about the reverse-engineering process or the state-by-state calculations!
by NoNameHaveI | 2026-02-25 15:00:36+00:00
When I began work at my last company, we all had to badge in to get in the parking lot, where there was 6 lanes 6-10a and just 2 other times. We also had to pass through 1 of 4 turnstyles, and we were subject to bag inspection going both in and out. We were trained to NEVER leave my badge in an unguarded location (ie my locked car at home, at lunch, etc). We were also trained to NOT display our badges off campus, especially when travelling.
This made me make DAMN SURE I knew where my badge was at at times. Same hook in the closet. When walking OUT through the turnstyle, I usually either put it in my bag if I had one, tucked into my shirt pocket, or just tucked under my shirt.
by giancarlostoro | 2026-02-25 15:00:37+00:00
> - You can't interrupt Claude (you press stop and he keeps going!)

This is normal behavior on desktop sometimes its in the middle of something? I also assume there's some latency

> - At best it stops but just keeps spinning

Latency issues then?

> - It can get stuck in plan mode

I've had this happen from the desktop, and using Claude Code from mobile before remote control, I assume this has nothing to do with remote control but a partial outage of sorts with Claude Code sometimes?

I don't work for Anthropic, just basing off my anecdotal experience.
by elliotbnvl | 2026-02-25 15:01:16+00:00
I’ve been doing this for a while [1], but ultimately settled on a building a thin transport layer for Telegram to accept and return media, and persistent channels, vastly improved messaging UX, etc. and ended up turning this into a ‘claw with a heartbeat and SOUL [2].

[1] https://elliotbonneville.com/phone-to-mac-persistent-termina...

[2] https://elliotbonneville.com/claude-code-is-all-you-need/
by giancarlostoro | 2026-02-25 15:01:40+00:00
Reminds me of Screeps, which I never took the time to fully play, but now I'm wondering if using Claude Code to play Screeps is cheating. Additionally, Screeps lets you host your own backend... What if we started benchmarking coding LLMs with Screeps?... Oh God... If anyone wants to do this let me know, I don't want to burn money on every LLM out there... I'll throw in my Claude Subscription into the contest...

Edit: Actually the repo README indeed says its inspired by Screeps. I don't know why they didn't just build on top of Screeps, maybe the idea is to have something anyone can pick up off the shelf for free?
by hrimfaxi | 2026-02-25 15:01:43+00:00
1. Citation needed. People in the US were arrested under this operation though they were foreign nationals.

2. History matters until it doesn't. There was a time when the US did not perform science experiments on unsuspecting populations, too. The government does not get the benefit of the doubt when it comes to "past performance is not indicative of future performance".

3. We have seen sitting presidents pardon people for crimes they have yet to commit.

4. "Not worse" is not a selling point.
by jondwillis | 2026-02-25 15:02:01+00:00
I initially didn’t read this post, fixated on “company event”, and thought it could be used for a single-day, one-off “thing to do tonight given (location) and (preferred activities/venue type) after (work end time)” It presented hotels and then some potential activities, but didn’t look up the time. When I asked about what is open after the time, the agent seemed to realize my request was not in your typical use case flow and gave me a refusal.

It’d be cool to offer one-off event suggestions, but I understand that’s probably not as easily monetizable.
by chrisjj | 2026-02-25 15:02:09+00:00
> How do you plan to prove that a user is at least 13 without collecting ID or having a third party do it

"you can verify your age on Facebook by taking a video selfie"
https://www.facebook.com/help/958848942357089

> The ICO press release says that self-declaration is inadequate here,

I agree.

> and the other methods they recommend in their age assurance document cannot ensure anonymity.

Hang on though. What I was challenging was your claim UK is pushing identity verification. That's different.
by zadikian | 2026-02-25 15:02:26+00:00
But was this because it's .online? I got one and it was fine.

The only issue was the usual trap with all Namecheap domains: They tell you it's all set, and it works, until they randomly email you a week later asking for email verification. If you don't do that promptly, they suspend your domain until you trigger a resend. Which is easy to fix but also strange.
by floatrock | 2026-02-25 15:02:28+00:00
It's not whataboutism, it's suggesting the premise is theatrics and there's ulterior shitty-person motives behind the curtain.

But sure, let's go back to just the first half of my argument... still waiting for a real citation of this actually being a problem rather than people just stating it is because that's what their feelings say because their fav podcaster said so one day in a misleading gotcha hitpiece, which is the exact machinery of the aforementioned culture war theatrics.

You know, the same misused machinery that can now be done at an industrial rate (how many comments here do you think are by real people?) and is the reason for us technologists' general feeling of impending existential dread around this very "hmm AI companies are turning off the safeties" thread...
by cdrage | 2026-02-25 15:03:14+00:00
Ahhh, one of the reasons could be that Docker Desktop by default uses 50% of your RAM when they create their VM and the maximum amount of CPUs.

Podman Desktop by default has a much lower RAM (4GB) + CPU usage (50% CPU). That's something that could be improved... I've opened up an issue: https://github.com/podman-desktop/podman-desktop/issues/1634... :)
Ask HN: Is RAG an antipattern for AI agents?
by rklosowski | 2026-02-25 15:03:38+00:00
Every agent framework I've used treats document retrieval the same way: build a custom pipeline, pick an embedding model, set up a vector store, wire it all into a tool. Repeat for every new project.

I'm starting to think this is the wrong abstraction entirely.

The universal interface every agent already supports is reading files. So I've been designing around that instead:

Mount a drive at /drive/ with two directories:

- /drive/files/ — actual documents (PDF, code, markdown, etc.)

- /drive/search/ — virtual directory where the filename IS the query

Agent wants context on "refund policy for enterprise customers"?

cat "/drive/search/refund policy for enterprise customers"

Returns the most relevant chunk. No custom tool. No vector store API. No pipeline to maintain. Any runtime that reads files works immediately.

Under the hood: markitdown for parsing, sqlite-vss for search, virtual filesystem layer for the interface.

Is this a solved problem I'm not aware of? Or is the "each agent builds its own RAG" approach as wasteful as it feels?

Building in public if there's interest — @r_klosowski on X.
by jeroenhd | 2026-02-25 15:03:39+00:00
These alternative domains are quite popular with the fediverse and other hobbyist-run groups. Affordable domains with somewhat recognisable names still available.

Scam websites will use any TLD in my experience. Based on the ones that made it to my Google search results, .it and .info are the TLDs I should be blocking. When I search for "free roblox cash", most websites are .com. "Free robux" also brings forth a few .ca websites. "Free steam gift card" leads to .org and .com.
by myvoiceismypass | 2026-02-25 15:04:08+00:00
Thank you for sharing this, I was unaware! It launches tomorrow.

This is the footnote regarding Stripe: "New deal incoming: RVI has entered a binding agreement to invest in Stripe, Inc. This investment is expected to close after RVI’s IPO, subject to meeting customary closing conditions. Note: This deal isn’t guaranteed to close."
by Copernicron | 2026-02-25 15:04:23+00:00
RCS works perfectly on stock and I haven't had any random drops of the cell network since I switched back. I'm not saying it's bug-free, but those particular issues disappeared with stock compared to GOS. It could also be because I'm on a Pixel 10 Pro and they just haven't worked out all the issues yet. I plan to try again in a few months.
by paxys | 2026-02-25 15:04:34+00:00
I interviewed at Anthropic last year and their entire "ethics" charade was laughable.

Write essays about AI safety in the application.

An entire interview round dedicated to pretending that you truly only care about AI safety and not the money.

Every employee you talk to forced to pretend that the company is all about philanthropy, effective altruism and saving the world.

In reality it was a mid-level manager interviewing a mid-level engineer (me), both putting on a performance while knowing fully well that we'd do what the bosses told us to do.

And that is exactly what is happening now. The mission has been scrubbed, and the thousands of "ethical" engineers you hired are all silent now that real money is on the line.
by simianwords | 2026-02-25 15:04:36+00:00
It could be that OpenAI is subsidising their models by _fifty times_. Do you really think they are doing that? In some cases the costs went down by 200x. Do you really think OpenAI is subsidising their models by 200??

Its easier to just admit that technological advances helped decrease the cost instead of coming up with more complicated reasons like VC funding, subsidies and so on.

For instance take Deepseek and other opensource models - even they have reduced their costs by a huge margin. What explanation is there for opensource models?
by dralley | 2026-02-25 15:04:41+00:00
> The death toll, initially put at 500 by Hamas and then lowered to 471, is believed by Western intelligence agencies to be considerably lower — but no number has been verified. The hospital itself was not directly struck; whatever caused the explosion actually hit the hospital courtyard, where people had gathered for safety, and a handful of parked cars.

> Moreover, the crater left from the impact was relatively small, a fact that Israel has cited in arguing that none of its munitions caused the blast, and could be consistent with a number of different munitions. Hamas has not produced a remnant of an Israeli munition or any physical evidence to back up its claim that Israel is responsible.

...

> In addition, the videos show that the projectile in the Al Jazeera footage was launched after the barrage of Palestinian rockets Israeli officials assessed was responsible for the hospital explosion.

> From 6:59 p.m. on Oct. 17, barrages of Palestinian rockets are fired from two positions southwest and northwest of the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, the videos show. Flames from the Palestinian rockets are visible in the nighttime sky as their engines propel them northeast toward Israel. More than 25 seconds elapse between the final Palestinian rocket and the hospital explosion.

The Al Jazeera footage does show an interception, not the rocket that hit the courtyard. This has been known for years, indeed. But there were like 5 different videos of the event, which were frequently confused for each other, and that's not the one I'm referring to. The AJ footage went the most "viral" even though it was pretty obvious that it wasn't the right event if you knew what you were looking at. I don't know why the Times didn't mention any of the others.

In any case literally all of the context around it remains a lie, and would still be a lie even if it ended up being a failed Iron Dome missile launched during the rocket barrage as the Times implied
by poizan42 | 2026-02-25 15:04:42+00:00
> The output should be encoded as a pretty JSON string.

...

> Your parser should store the following output in $outputPath as a JSON file:

{
"\/blog\/11-million-rows-in-seconds": {
"2025-01-24": 1,
"2026-01-24": 2
},
"\/blog\/php-enums": {
"2024-01-24": 1
}
}

They don't define what exactly "pretty" means, but superflous escapes are not very pretty in my opinion.
Show HN: MCPSpec – Ship reliable MCP servers without writing test code
by warmcat | 2026-02-25 15:04:50+00:00
Hi HN,

I've been building MCPSpec, an open-source CLI for MCP server reliability. Record sessions, generate mock servers, catch Tool Poisoning, and fail your CI build when something's wrong — without writing test code.

There are ways to validate MCP servers today — the MCP Inspector, ad-hoc SDK scripts, unit tests for server internals — but nothing that handles regression detection, security auditing, mock generation, and CI pass/fail checks in one tool. MCPSpec does that:

1. Record a session against your real server, replay it after changes to catch regressions

2. Generate a standalone .js mock from any recording — no API keys, no live server needed in CI

3. Security audit with 8 rules including Tool Poisoning (prompt injection hidden in tool descriptions)

4. 0-100 quality score across documentation, schema quality, error handling, responsiveness, and security

5. One command to generate GitHub Actions / GitLab CI configs

No LLMs in the loop. Deterministic and fast. Ships with 70 ready-to-run tests for 7 popular MCP servers.

GitHub: https://github.com/light-handle/mcpspec
Docs: https://light-handle.github.io/mcpspec/

Would love feedback or feature ideas.
by mystraline | 2026-02-25 15:04:55+00:00
They should be held legally culpable for libellous claims they make.

I dont care if their pre-LLM ai says "thingy bad". They are responsible for the scripts or black boxes they control. I dont care if they dont give a reason.

Claiming bad/malicious/etc site is 100% libel. And doubly so, anybody who has been forced to agree to a ToS with binding arbitration should have it removed for libel.
by 5o1ecist | 2026-02-25 15:05:00+00:00
Speaking of facts, when you deliberately choose not to have any, is ridiculous.

You are, evidently, not a good person. You are driven by ideology and the delusion that "my side is the good one". You provide evidence that this cannot be true, though, because if it was, you would not be behaving in such hatefull manner.

You are not a social person, you are a political person.

There is a very specific term for such people.
by akersten | 2026-02-25 15:05:11+00:00
Not an insider but someone who uses the tools. It's a branding update, nothing more. The models haven't gotten any less sanctimonious, but the companies behind them have stopped harping on their restrictions in order to appeal to a broader customer base (gov contracts, etc.)

So the guardrails (for you and me) are still there. They just stopped committing the unforced error of excluding themselves from federal procurement. Under a different administration, the requirement might change, and you might see them boasting once more on "safety."
by NoNameHaveI | 2026-02-25 15:05:33+00:00
2 things to think about here:
1. Coding is just one phase of the software development life cycle (SDLC). We still have to gather requirements, design, test, release, and most importantly maintain. I was taught, albeit years ago, that code spends most of its life in maintenance and that is the phase where the most money is spent.
2. Keep in mind Amdahl's law. The limit of software cost as coding cost approaches zero is the cost of the other phases of the SDLC. Apologies to Amdahl for the cheap, dirty bastardization.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-25 15:06:00+00:00
Job listings are not full of doom and dread. If you look at a job listing and all you can think about is doom and anxiety, that’s the doomscrolling in other domains coloring your perception of life.

It’s amazing how quickly we forget how this works. Only a few years ago you could doomscroll your way into believing COVID was the end of the world and life would never be the same again.
by rprend | 2026-02-25 15:06:13+00:00
Yes. Stripe’s 2.9% fee minus interchange (interchange is variable, on average 1.9%) is higher than Mastercard or Visa’s take of .14%.

But it’s not so simple, because Stripe faces liability for merchant fraud. If you are high volume you negotiate IC+, where the plus is .1%-.4%.

The valuations price in expected growth as well as unit economics. Mastercard doesn’t have as much room to grow because cards already saturate consumer payments.
by ambicapter | 2026-02-25 15:06:45+00:00
Sorry, this can't be anything but an intentionally obfuscating comment that I need to call out.

> more of a statement of human behavior under uncertainty and non-determinism rather than the tools themselves.

This is basically saying "It's not gambling, it's just the psychological underpinnings that form the foundation of all gambling enterprises". Who cares to split this difference other than casino owners?
by jcgl | 2026-02-25 15:07:00+00:00
If I understand you right, you’re talking (partly) about a distributed name system. Conceptually, I’m generally skeptical of such things. Maybe you can clarify what I’m missing or why your plan is different.

You generally need to trade off two things:

1. A global namespace
2. Users being able to choose names without contention/disagreement about who owns which name

The only way to cut that knot is for an authority arbitrate access to names. That’s what we have now with the DNS and its registrars.
by quinncom | 2026-02-25 15:07:15+00:00
I just learned yesterday that ChatGPT (and maybe others) can’t connect to a MCP running on localhost; it needs an endpoint on the public internet. (I guess because the request comes from OpenAI servers?)

I’d rather not expose a private MCP to the public, so ContextVM sounds like a step in the right direction. But I’m confused about how it is called: doesn’t OpenAI’s servers still need you to provide a public endpoint with a domain name and TLS? Or does it use a Nostr API?
by Bender | 2026-02-25 15:07:16+00:00
Most probable reason would be that I ended up editing on the wrong machine while being offline or having it open on another one, so user error. But I don't know.

File locks or attempting to overwrite and open database would be a problem regardless of schema format or what application is holding the database file open for writing. This should be expected behavior and one would hope the app would detect this and seqfault / core dump without corrupting the original / previous version of the database file.
by anatolecallies | 2026-02-25 15:07:22+00:00
We run an LLM system that reads messy medical records and determines clinical trial eligibility.

We tried eval platforms, LLM-as-judge, and automated prompt optimizers. None helped with what actually mattered: hidden domain policies that weren’t explicitly written anywhere.

We ended up building our own annotation UI, prompt integration workflow (via Claude Code SDK), and HTML diff-based experiment reports.

The biggest lesson: off-the-shelves Eval/Annotations/Prompt Optimization tools are sub-part because they can only be generic.

Curious whether others building AI products have reached the same conclusion.
by ceejayoz | 2026-02-25 15:07:38+00:00
None of these are refutations.

For example:

> Overconfident negatives: no exchange of fire is a strong claim based on limited recordings. Absence of audible return fire in a few clips isn’t proof.

> - Quick search reveals names of 15 dead are PRCS: Mustafa Khafaja; Ezz El-Din Shaat; Saleh Muammar; Refaat Radwan; Muhammad Bahloul; Ashraf Abu Libda; Muhammad al-Hila; Raed al-Sharif. Civil Defense: Zuhair Abdul Hamid al-Farra; Samir Yahya al-Bahapsa; Ibrahim Nabil al-Maghari; Fouad Ibrahim al-Jamal; Youssef Rassem Khalifa; Anwar al-Attar. UNRWA: Kamal Mohammed Shahtout.

Even the IDF itself won't go this far in trying to muddle the waters.

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/defense-news/article-85076...

"The IDF did not use the six Hamas terrorists who were wearing dual hats, as medics and terrorists, as an excuse for the mistakes made in the episode, given that the IDF forces involved did not know whether they were Hamas – and when the soldiers got up close to them, they found that they were unarmed."
by vuggamie | 2026-02-25 15:08:00+00:00
AI is another step up the ladder of abstraction, another tool like linters, compilers, IDEs, code completion.

Can Claude replace you? Have LLMs altered the software developer productivity equation?

In 1987, Fred Brooks wrote [1]:

"But, as we look to the horizon of a decade hence, we see no silver bullet. There is no single development, in either technology or in management technique, that by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity."

Most companies do not measure software developer productivity. I have never been part of an organization that does.

Will it collapse the economy? The last innovation to collapse the economy was credit default swaps. This says more about the economic systems we have built than technology or progress.

No one knows what is going to happen. But humans are still necessary for every stage of labor, and software developers are still necessary for making software.

[1] https://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/Outreach/pc204/NoSilverBullet.html