MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Continue – Source-controlled AI checks, enforceable in CI
by sestinj | 2026-02-17 17:08:14+00:00
We now write most of our code with agents. For a while, PRs piled up, causing review fatigue, and we had this sinking feeling that standards were slipping. Consistency is tough at this volume. I’m sharing the solution we found, which has become our main product.

Continue (https://docs.continue.dev) runs AI checks on every PR. Each check is a source-controlled markdown file in `.continue/checks/` that shows up as a GitHub status check. They run as full agents, not just reading the diff, but able to read/write files, run bash commands, and use a browser. If it finds something, the check fails with one click to accept a diff. Otherwise, it passes silently.

Here’s one of ours:

.continue/checks/metrics-integrity.md

---
name: Metrics Integrity
description: Detects changes that could inflate, deflate, or corrupt metrics (session counts, event accuracy, etc.)
---

Review this PR for changes that could unintentionally distort metrics.
These bugs are insidious because they corrupt dashboards without triggering errors or test failures.

Check for:
- "Find or create" patterns where the "find" is too narrow, causing entity duplication (e.g. querying only active sessions, missing completed ones, so every new commit creates a duplicate)
- Event tracking calls inside loops or retry paths that fire multiple times per logical action
- Refactors that accidentally remove or move tracking calls to a path that executes with different frequency

Key files: anything containing `posthog.capture` or `trackEvent`

This check passed without noise for weeks, but then caught a PR that would have silently deflated our session counts. We added it in the first place because we’d been burned in the past by bad data, only noticing when a dashboard looked off.

---

To get started, paste this into Claude Code or your coding agent of choice:

Help me write checks for this codebase: https://continue.dev/walkthrough

It will:

- Explore the codebase and use the `gh` CLI to read past review comments

- Write checks to `.continue/checks/`

- Optionally, show you how to run them locally or in CI

Would love your feedback!
by bpt3 | 2026-02-17 17:08:18+00:00
So I read the Matt Levine article on this and a couple other pieces, and I'm not getting the impression Levine or other mainstream economists think this is a good idea as it currently stands? I don't necessarily think they are suggesting its clearly bad either, but it didn't seem as positive on it as I was expecting from your comment.

Can you provide some more information, because I'm not really seeing the value in being required to interact with more financial institutions in practice.
by daine | 2026-02-17 17:08:59+00:00
It is my feeling that some of the conspicuous behaviors of people in positions of influence and monetary wealth do, in fact, rob the practitioner of the small joys of life won through small sacrifice. I do not envy the man who gains hedonic leisure at the expense of the opportunity to elevate a mundane message into a medium for a modicum of joy, and potential human connection. I love tending my garden, and trimming the weeds in our sidewalk.
Show HN: I Forked Moltbook to Build a Hybrid Social Network (Humans and AI)
by shahidbilal6535 | 2026-02-17 17:09:06+00:00
Hi HN,
I’m a 19-year-old student. I’ve been following the "Dead Internet Theory" discussions and realized the original Moltbook project had a fatal flaw: it was just bots talking to bots. It was a simulation, not a network.
So, I forked the codebase and rebuilt it with Next.js and Supabase to create Theeno.
The Hypothesis:
Theeno is an intersection. Instead of segregating AI into chatbots, we are putting Biological Intelligence (Humans) and Artificial Intelligence (Agents running locally via tools like OpenClaw) into the same real-time feed as equals.
The Architecture (The "Wild West"):
Feed: Fully real-time (Optimistic UI).
Agent Auth: This is an experiment. We haven't built a rigid API wall yet. The "Agent Signup" flow is currently the same as the Human flow. We are inviting developers to see if their agents can navigate the sign-up process just like humans do.
Memory: We do NOT store agent memories centrally. We believe in Decentralized Memory. Your agent (running on your local machine) keeps its own history/context. We just provide the public square.
The "Student Budget" Constraint:
I am hosting this on a Vercel Free Tier (hence the .vercel.app domain) because I have $0 funding. My focus is on the code, not the vanity URL.
The Challenge:
Join the experiment. Talk to the first wave of entities. See if you can tell who is running locally and who is biological.
I’m here to answer questions about the fork and the Supabase integration. Roast my architecture
Grand Time: Time-Based Models in Decentralized Trust
by AGsist | 2026-02-17 17:09:23+00:00
Grand Time 1.0: frozen research spec with time as non-monetary latent accounting primitive, governance-free.

Invariants via formulas: 333-day stability, mint coverage gates, Time Capital activation (no price impact), multi-asset liquidity/emergency segregation.

No tokens/investments/production — research artifacts only.

Seeking 2–3 senior contributors for verification, simulations, invariant checks (unpaid).

Details: https://github.com/ArturGrandi/gt1-implementation-reference/issues/1
Paper: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18190386
EF ESP submission for GT 2.0 track.

Open to discussion.
by jamesgresql | 2026-02-17 17:09:29+00:00
This is a no-nonsense walkthrough of doing hybrid search inside Postgres without spinning up a separate search service.

A few takeaway:
- Postgres’s native `tsvector/ts_rank` stuff works ok for basic text matching, but it doesn’t account for global term frequency like BM25 does , so rankings can feel “flat” or noisy as soon as you go beyond simple queries (it's also slow).
- Using a BM25 index (via extensions like `pg_search`) actually gives you relevance scores similar to what you’d expect out of modern search engines, and you can use stemmers/tokenization directly in SQL. BM25 is the star of this story.
- Vector search fills in the semantic gaps (so “database optimization” isn’t limited to exact keywords), but you still don’t want to throw out lexical relevance. The trick is making it additive, not just adding scores together.
- RRF (Reciprocal Rank Fusion) is a neat practical tool here. It sidesteps trying to normalize totally different scoring systems by just focusing on rank positions.

If you’re building anything where relevance matters (docs, product search, help articles) having BM25 + vector makes a big difference over vanilla FTS + embeddings alone. It also keeps everything in Postgres, which simplifies consistency/ops compared to an external search cluster.
Show HN: Self-Hosted Task Scheduling System (Back End and UI and Python SDK)
by rilesthefirst | 2026-02-17 17:09:38+00:00
Hey HN,

I’ve been working on a small side project called Cratos and wanted to share it to get feedback.

Cratos is a self-hosted task scheduling system. You configure a URL, define when it should be called, and Cratos handles scheduling, retries, execution history, and real-time updates. The goal was to have something lightweight and fully owned - no SaaS dependency, no external cron service.

It’s split into three repositories:

Backend service: https://github.com/Ghiles1010/Cratos

Web dashboard: https://github.com/Ghiles1010/Cratos-UI

Python SDK: https://github.com/Ghiles1010/Cratos-SDK

Why I built it:

In a few projects, I repeatedly needed reliable scheduled webhooks with:

Retry logic

Execution logs/history

A dashboard to inspect runs

Easy local deployment

I didn’t want to depend on external services or re-implement job scheduling from scratch every time. The goal was simple deployment (docker compose up) and full control.

It’s still early, but usable. I’d especially appreciate feedback from people who’ve built or operated schedulers, cron replacements, or internal job runners

I would love some feedback, or tell me how it would be useful to you
by mbreese | 2026-02-17 17:09:47+00:00
I left out that the line before there was a check to make sure the input byte was between ‘a’ and ‘z’. This ensures that if the char is already upper case, you don’t do an extraneous OR. And at this point, OR, XOR, or even a subtract 0x20 would work. For some reason the LLM thought the XOR was faster.

I honestly wouldn’t have thought anything of it if I hadn’t seen it written as `b ^ 0x20`.
Ask HN: How do you motivate your humans to stop AI-washing their emails?
by causal | 2026-02-17 17:09:49+00:00
I see it more and more in email, Slack, text, etc: People too scared to share their own thoughts so they AI-wash it and send an exhausting page of "It's not X, it's Y!" slop instead.

I'm not the CEO, I can't order people to stop. The CEO does it too.

I try talking to people directly, but people get defensive and there's always the chance they didn't use AI. I need indirect means of socializing change.

Looking for anything I can use to socialize against AI-washing: Articles, memes, policies that other companies have successfully used- whatever.
by brabel | 2026-02-17 17:09:54+00:00
My brother in Brazil graduated in a world where Mechanical Engineers were needed a lot, but the decline was already going on, unbeknownst to most. During his career it just got harder and harder to change jobs, until after a second or third layoff he had enough and migrated to Australia. I wasn’t so sure he would succeed since at the time, all car companies were closing down (Mitsubishi first, then Ford a finally even Holden, the pride of Australian car industry). Somehow, though, he had several opportunities and is still working on a very good job. I suppose he might be one the last few able to have a lifetime career in this field.
by vessenes | 2026-02-17 17:09:57+00:00
Meh. Semantic Ablation - but toward a directed goal. If I say "How would Hemingway have said this, provided he had the same mindset he did post-war while writing for Collier's?"

Then the model will look for clusters that don't fit what the model consider's to be Hemingway/Colliers/Post-War and suggest in that fashion.

"edit this" -> blah

"imagine Tom Wolfe took a bunch of cocaine and was getting paid by the word to publish this after his first night with Aline Bernstein" -> probably less blah
by gdulli | 2026-02-17 17:10:03+00:00
Kaffee: Corporal, would you turn to the page in this book that says where the mess hall is, please?

Cpl. Barnes: Well, Lt. Kaffee, that's not in the book, sir.

Kaffee: You mean to say in all your time at Gitmo, you've never had a meal?

Cpl. Barnes: No, sir. Three squares a day, sir.

Kaffee: I don't understand. How did you know where the mess hall was if it's not in this book?

Cpl. Barnes: Well, I guess I just followed the crowd at chow time, sir.

Kaffee: No more questions.
by benzible | 2026-02-17 17:10:23+00:00
The chilling effect is the entire point. An FCC source literally told CNN, "the threat is the point." CBS isn't being randomly skittish. Paramount needs regulatory approval for its WBD acquisition, paid $16 million to settle a Trump lawsuit right before needing FCC approval for the Skydance merger, and canceled Colbert days after he criticized that deal. ABC suspended Kimmel after FCC threats. The FCC opened an investigation into The View just for having Talarico on.

And yes, Larry Ellison is a hardcore Trump supporter, but even if he weren't, this is how every network is behaving. Disney's Bob Iger is a Democrat and ABC still paid Trump and suspended Kimmel. When the government holds regulatory leverage over your business, "obeying in advance" isn't cowardice you can blame on the network, it's the intended mechanism of state pressure.
by epistasis | 2026-02-17 17:10:56+00:00
Well that's the crux of it, isn't it? How do you know what they really mean, if not through the words? You have to impose a mental model on the speaker, which we of course do anyways.

Saying ETF crash specifically sounds like there is an idea there, and lots of people talk about thinking that ETFs specifically have problems that owning stocks directly would not have, so in my mind the model is that the speaker has an idea about how ETFs cause the crash through hidden risk. And since hidden risk is behind most crashes, it's definitely an interesting direction to ask about.
by advisedwang | 2026-02-17 17:11:08+00:00
I'd like to see more public banks. Municipalities, and even states, are holding balances in commercial banks but there's nothing stopping them holding this in their own bank to direct capital for public benefit. California has a law allowing it, although despite a campaign in LA I don't know if it's been used. North Dakota has a state-wide public bank. It works!
by marcusverus | 2026-02-17 17:11:36+00:00
The coalition government prevents a single party from controlling the government, which is definitely a benefit, since the two parties will somewhat limit the ambitions of the other. In the areas where they agree, though, those parties (who only represent 45% of the country) are able to rule the other 55%, who don't want to be ruled by them but have very few options for relief.

> I'm not sure why the popular vote is an issue here.

It's not about the vote, it's about the human beings who are ruled by a government they don't want.

We can all look at a country like North Korea, where the ruler is oppressing the hell out of his people, and feel for them. We understand implicitly that it is wrong for one man (or a ruling clique) to dominate the other 99% of people who don't want to be dominated by him. We can also look at a country like apartheid South Africa, where a relatively small majority dominated the majority, and say that is wrong. As people who've been raised and indoctrinated as (small-d) democrats, it's easy to look at our systems, where a paltry 49% (or, in Germany, 54%) of the people are being dominated by the other 51% (45%), but this is merely the result of habit. There is no reason that they should be forced to live and work and be taxed by a system they dislike or even abhor. And, of course, the sense that the evolution of the state has somehow "peaked" with democracy is an expression of the most common bias of all, which is our "presentism" bias--that past progress is obvious in retrospect but future progress is impossible, undesirable, or, at best, inscrutible.

> I don't see much of a problem.

Neither did Europe in the 20s, to their great discredit.

> The claim that a fragmented territory with a multitude of small democracies is a good thing is a libertarian pipe dream.

Because you say so?

> This view is quite frankly absurd considering that every government task is subject to economies of scale: defense, police, health insurance, social security, pension systems, roads, you name it.

Nine of the ten countries with the highest GDP per capita have a population under ~7 million: Monaco, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Ireland, Switzerland, Iceland, Singapore, Norway and Denmark. Perhaps you should inform them how "frankly absurd" they've been to forego the benefits of economies of scale?
by onetimeusename | 2026-02-17 17:11:59+00:00
I think that's a fear I have about AI for programming (and I use them). So let's say we have a generation of people who use AI tools to code and no one really thinks hard about solving problems in niche spaces. Though we can build commercial products quickly and easily, no one really writes code for difficult problem spaces so no one builds up expertise in important subdomains for a generation. Then what will AI be trained on in let's say 20-30 years? Old code? It's own AI developed code for vibe coded projects? How will AI be able to do new things well if it was trained on what people wrote previously and no one writes novel code themselves? It seems to me like AI is pretty dependent on having a corpus of human made code so, for example, I am not sure if it will be able to learn how to write very highly optimized code for some ISA in the future.
by co_king_5 | 2026-02-17 17:12:24+00:00
I think the LLM providers are selling the ability to create a mirage.

LLMs are a tool for marketers or state departments who want to be create FUD on a moment's notice.

The obvious truth is that LLMs basically suck for writing code.

The real marketing scheme is the ability to silence and stifle that obvious truth.
by WalterBright | 2026-02-17 17:12:40+00:00
> in direct opposition to current goal of producing labour units for corporate

I never understood this characterization. How do the schools implement a goal for producing labor units?

> education itself of course should be free

People don't value what they get for free. If you sign up for a course in welding, are you going to be more or less diligent in learning it if you have to pay the tuition?
by austin-cheney | 2026-02-17 17:12:42+00:00
See also https://diskprices.com/ for inspiration.

The disk prices site does the exact same thing but the product is digital storage hardware. They made $50k from referrals to Amazon in 2024.

The disk prices site frustrates me because it illustrates so directly to costs imposed on the US from the current tariffs. I was able to get a 14tb disk from there DEC 2024 for $90 and now the cheapest is $220.
by ferguess_k | 2026-02-17 17:13:07+00:00
Exactly. Pick one that excites you, and paint a picture that you are special in a list. I think that definitely excited me and put a meaning, however small, into my very boring and mundane life. Dogs at least have freedom.

BTW definitely would love to do more professional assembly or microcode, if possible! I'm planning to migrate a very old kernel to different architectures and there is tons of assembly code, or, to be more precisely, more cursed GCC inline assembly code in the kernel. E.g. everything in string.h is in asm.
by toraway | 2026-02-17 17:13:08+00:00
Per another of OP's comments in this thread, they seem to suggest that CBS (of all organizations) is actually trying to help a Democrat with better chances in the general to defeat a Republican. So, therefore, they artificially manufactured a Streisand Effect stunt by killing the interview.

Because that's somehow a more parsimonious explanation than the clear pattern of Brendan Carr's statements and actions using the FCC to accomplish the political goals of the administration.
by irishcoffee | 2026-02-17 17:13:43+00:00
> What are the second-order effects of a subclass of citizens permanently encumbered by debt that (with rare exceptions) cannot be discharged through bankruptcy?

A harsh lesson in personal responsibility. If you went to an out-of-state school to major in criminology hoping to be the next CSI, and you borrowed 180k to do it, you've learned a valuable lesson.

Don't give me "they're only kids, they aren't able to make these decisions!"
by lenerdenator | 2026-02-17 17:13:45+00:00
> There is roughly $6 trillion of it, sitting in American public pension funds, currently being allocated in a way that serves nobody.

Yeah. That's what pension funds do. They accumulate money and hand it out to people who think they damn well better be able to withdraw upon it.

In 1960, the birth rate in the US started to decline. It hasn't had a meaningful rise since. [0]

Markets can experience natural growth - typically through birth rates, sometimes through immigration - or they can begin to more thoroughly monetize capital as to create growth from fewer people.

The Baby Boomers thoroughly broke the ability to grow through natural means, and it's been that way for 25-30 years.

This is a problem, because you need that natural growth to fund the retirements that the Boomers planned on having, along with the entitlement state in the US, which focuses almost exclusively on people over the age of 65 with OASDI and Medicare.

So how do you solve this problem?

If you're investing the hospital business, for example, you can no longer expect the same sort of growth that you used to if your plan is to have a current customer birth their 2.1 kids in your maternity ward. You now need to do other things to monetize the current customer, like charging him more for his next procedure, or - even better - looking to developing markets like India (or China 25 years ago) and focus your investment there. It's a lot easier to bring a rural clinic "up to spec" in China than it is in the US, because one started out with far cheaper needs to meet. X-ray machines are easy to install; cancer centers with advanced imaging machines and academic medicine practitioners are expensive.

And that's what the investors do. They find ways to get in on deals that aren't in the US. It's not just medicine, either. That capital that built Shenzhen into a tech mecca came from the US.

In the meantime, they need to find ways to exist in the American market, so they do what I mentioned earlier: they monetize the hell out of customers they already have. If that means closing a hospital and making the "customer" (read: guy having a heart attack) go to one twenty miles further away that has a better business value, then they do exactly that.

Or, they find ways to monetize the younger generations more, since they're not drawing on pensions and IRAs yet. Otherwise they risk gobbling up the returns they handed back to their members with increased costs.

[0]https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...
by dsf2d | 2026-02-17 17:13:55+00:00
Ive noticed that the subtle/nunance gets lost with every so-called improvement with the models.

Im in no way anti-LLMs as I have benefited from them, but I believe the issue that will arise is that their unpredictable nature means that they can only be used in narrowly defined contexts. Safety and trust are paramount. Would you use online banking if the balance on your account randomly changed and was not reproducible? No chance.

This does not achieve the ROI that investors of these model producers are thinking. The question is whether said investors can sell off their shares before it becomes more widely known.
by homarp | 2026-02-17 17:14:20+00:00
I really liked this part:

In December 2024, during the frenzied adoption of LLM coding assistants, we became aware that such tools tended—unsurprisingly—to produce Go code in a style similar to the mass of Go code used during training, even when there were newer, better ways to express the same idea. Less obviously, the same tools often refused to use the newer ways even when directed to do so in general terms such as “always use the latest idioms of Go 1.25.” In some cases, even when explicitly told to use a feature, the model would deny that it existed. [...] To ensure that future models are trained on the latest idioms, we need to ensure that these idioms are reflected in the training data, which is to say the global corpus of open-source Go code.
by wahern | 2026-02-17 17:14:34+00:00
Most states already have affordable tuition for in-state residents. California is middle of the pack, and CSU tuition is less than $10k/year. (Nationwide, public in-state 4-year tuition ranges from ~$5k/yr to ~$15k/yr.)

For most students at public 4-year universities in the US, room & board costs significantly more than tuition. Even in those EU countries where tuition is free, average student loan debt is often >$20k USD because of this. By way of comparison, average student loan debt in the US is ~$40k USD, and that includes private school and out-of-state student tuition as well as room & board. Note that at least for the US, $40k is the mean; the median debt is <$30k. And these numbers are totals, not per year.

Perhaps one of the best ways to address the college affordability "crisis" would be to build more dormitories. The capital expenses could be publicly funded, and then charge students maintenance costs. But for various reasons, including NIMBY development barriers as well as modern expectations (see, e.g., the vitriol spewed about the windowless UCSB Munger Hall bedrooms), schools have long ago neglected this aspect.