MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tonyedgecombe | 2026-02-16 10:50:22+00:00
>The ideal situation is for it to always be better to collaborate on open source software than to build in private and keep it to yourself.

This works for some software (developer tools is the prime example) but not so much for other things. Who is going to maintain the MTD software I used for my VAT returns without recompense. Who is going to update the PAYE payroll software I relied on.

Even with developer tools I feel we will lose something without companies like JetBrains. There would be no Kotlin without people paying for their software.

That's before you think about huge corporations leeching off of our free work or the AI companies vacuuming up open source only to regurgitate it for $200 a month.

Developers should consider that most people value things by how much they pay and if they aren't paying anything then you and your work can't have much value.
by chronid | 2026-02-16 10:50:29+00:00
> Developers are - on average - terrible at this. If they weren't, TPMs, Product Managers, CTOs, none of them would need to exist.

This is not really true, in fact products become worse the farther away from the problem a developer is kept.

Best products I worked with and on (early in my career, before getting digested by big tech) had developers working closely with the users of the software. The worst were things like banking software for branches, where developers were kept as far as possible from the actual domain (and decision making) and driven with endless sterile spec documents.
by PurpleRamen | 2026-02-16 10:50:57+00:00
It's the old story: evil, irresponsible behaviour has a higher chance of success, than being good and responsible. AIs recent history is a good example. Google had the lead, but lost it (temporary) to OpenAI, because Google was responsible and were not willing to open pandoras box. Apple seems to have something similar to OpenClaw for a while now, but withholds from releasing it, because it's too unsecure. History is full of people burning the world for their own greed, and getting rewarded for it; and they then call it "taking risks" and "thinking outside the box"... I think the underlying reason might be in too many people thinking there is some level of competence behind the irresponsible behaviour and it's alls just controlled harm or something like that.
by nandomrumber | 2026-02-16 10:51:18+00:00
I wonder what the unintended consequences of that would be.

Imagine Americans celebrating, dancing, in the streets the nuclear-fire deaths of their fellow citizens, because at least some of them were of the wrong political persuasion.

Imagine whichever political party is in power in the US for the next 1000 years having a mandate to flatten any city or country for any real or perceived link to it in any way.
by rbanffy | 2026-02-16 10:51:38+00:00
> 2. It's not dog slow.

That’s very subjective. I have ADHD and I’m very sensitive to things that break my flow, but I don’t run pip frequently while I’m writing code, and the couple extra seconds it takes to do its job don’t bother me that much.

> 3. It automatically sets up venvs.

Remember: explicit is better than implicit.

> 4. It automatically activates the venv before running commands.

Again: explicit is better than implicit.

> 5. It supports a lock file out of the box.

Some (me included) would say it’s a big, not a feature.

> 6. It lets you specify the index for private packages. This fixes a major security issue with pip that they continue to ignore.

This is good - a lot of organisations concerned with that will block access to PyPI altogether and offer a selected cache for approved dependencies. Alternatively you can declare private dependencies as Git URLs with tags, bypassing the need for a private index.

> 7. It installs your code in the venv in editable more by default.

That’s a nice touch, but goes against the explicit/implicit rule- a different behaviour automatically triggered by something environmental.

> 8. It lets you install Python tools outside the venv (`uv tool install`).

I always recommend not messing with the system’s Python.

> 9. It works reliably.

I’ll need you to elaborate on that. I might be used to the way pip works, but it’s been a while since I had it fail to do something I asked without there being a very good reason (an impossible conflicting requirement).

This brings me to another concern - I wouldn’t want Python development to become more like JavaScript post-npm. Every external dependency you bring in must be justified and understood. This goes for simple ones and especially for complex ones with lots of secondary dependencies. Any external dependency you bring is now your responsibility to manage forever. I’m fine not having to reimplement NumPy’s MSE function or Django’s ORM, but I’ve moved away from things like click because they save me just a little extra work at the cost of having to remember it’s there forever.
by locknitpicker | 2026-02-16 10:52:07+00:00
> No, he's right. One should not pin their happiness to things outside their control.

I don't think this opinion is realistic or helpful. Being fired has an important impact on your happiness and the quality of life of you and your family, specially if the next job forces your family to move.

Some people are forced into homelessness when fired. Are we supposed to pretend that losing your home does not hamper your happiness?

It's unhelpful to suggest we should not stress about things outside of our control, because we still need to deal with them.
by lan321 | 2026-02-16 10:52:51+00:00
1. You can buy a cotton tshirt from LIDL for 3 bucks and it'll hold for years. It won't be cut perfectly or have the softest material but it's definitely not bad.

Of course, if I get it from Temu for 6 cents it'll probably fall apart in a week, but modern clothing isn't really covered by "the cheapest thing I can find".

Same for ultralight fabrics, that, while lovely in summer, usually get trashed in a season or two simply because the thing weighs fuck all.

I'd even say we're in a golden age for clothing. I can get a motorcycle jacket that can slide at 80kmh for 40 bucks with shoulder and elbow protectors and a thermo layer insert.
by fhennig | 2026-02-16 10:53:01+00:00
IMO this is a great example of how we're often asking loaded questions without realizing it.

IMO it's the same when we're asking:

"Should I implement X from scratch, or import a small library to do it?"

vs

"Should I add feature X to the codebase or bring in another dependency for it?"

In the first question, it sounds like a good idea to not reinvent the wheel, in the second it sounds bad to have dependency.
by rsynnott | 2026-02-16 10:53:28+00:00
> When the same professionals advocating "don't look at the code anymore" and "it's just the next level of abstraction" respond with outrage to a journalist giving them an unchecked article.

I doubt, by and large, that it's the same people. Just as this LLM misquoting is journalistic malpractice, "don't look at the code anymore" is engineering malpractice.
Show HN: Chisel for Claude. Vibe code 2X faster using your voice
by jorgtron | 2026-02-16 10:53:50+00:00
The problem: When vibe coding web apps and pages, I noticed I spent a lot of time giving Claude context about the UI changes I want to make.

For example, I would have to write things like "change the text below the login form at localhost:3000/dashboard to say X instead of Y, but only on the mobile version" to keep it from changing the wrong thing in the wrong way.

So I've built Chisel for Claude to solve this, and it works!

Now I just select the element I want to change using the Chisel Chrome extension, say the thing I want to change: "change this to Y" and say a "send phrase" (I use "Chisel", but you can choose your own) and it will send the instruction to Claude and start making the change completely hands free.

For me it's sped up my workflow by at least 2X. It let's me work primarily in the browser and remain in a creative flow state.

More benefits:

- 20+ languages supported
- Start recording on clicking elements (optional)
- Choose your own send and cancel phrases

Any feedback is welcome :)

Happy Chiseling!
by repstosb | 2026-02-16 10:54:06+00:00
If the goal is truly "clarity", then I fail to see how this leads to more readable programs than Knuth's Web (or cweb for a more practical implementation).

If you really mean "C/C++, but with the sharp pointy bits filed down," then I fail to see what it adds over MISRA.

The bottom line is that we've had "clarity-first" languages for decades; the reason they're not more widely used is not simply that no one has tried this, nor that programmers appreciate murky code.
by rzerowan | 2026-02-16 10:54:12+00:00
As i rmeber it ooxml backers made it intentionally harder to parse the specs than was necessary ,if it was fully open i believe the open source implementation would have been on par. As it is its subtly broken in annoying ways , and with Word being the default - its version wins out and gets to be the only acceptable submission format.
If you notice most doc submissions when its not a pdf being requested will specifify MS's version.And by sheer momentum the alts get less traction.
by matheusalmeida | 2026-02-16 10:54:22+00:00
The key difference is that it's not just about schema metadata (tables, indexes, views, columns, etc...). PostgreSQL is fabulous regarding this. Even native types are part of the catalog (pg_catalog).

Things are great in your DB... until they aren't. The post is about making observability a first-class citizen. Plans and query execution statistics, for example, queryable using a uniform interface (SQL) without the need to install DB extensions.
by myself248 | 2026-02-16 10:54:29+00:00
Right, but point is, assume the "backbone" never got fast enough to have a million subscribers all doing that at once.

I remember a subscriber T1 costing 4 figures per month, and I don't think it's because the copper pairs themselves were any different. (They weren't. As long as they didn't have bridge-taps, it was just plain old pairs. The repeaters every few kilofeet were not that expensive either.)

I remember the early-90s internet guidance that idle traffic like keepalive pings was discouraged, especially if you were sending traffic overseas, because it cluttered up the backbone links with packets that weren't actually valuable, and that was rude / abusive. Presumably edge CDNs would've still happened (or, ISPs providing Usenet servers basically did a lot of that already), but you simply wouldn't be doing video over the internet at large because the bandwidth charges would kill you.
by traes | 2026-02-16 10:54:29+00:00
He's up there for sure, but not clearly the best. According to him both he and Magnus think Alireza Firouzja is the best in longer matches of multiple bullet games.[0] I suspect he would give the edge to Magnus in a shorter match, but I haven't found evidence for this.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKXV9-dTq1I&t=2674s
Show HN: cc-hdrm v1.3 – macOS menu bar app that tracks your Claude subscription
by rajish | 2026-02-16 10:54:53+00:00
I built a menu-bar utility for Claude Code users who want to view their remaining token headroom without checking the web dashboard. It polls the Anthropic usage API (not the chat API, so no tokens are spent) and displays your remaining capacity with burn-rate indicators.

v1.3 adds dollar-based subscription tracking: see what percentage of your monthly subscription you've actually used, track extra usage spend in real time, and get tier recommendations based on your usage patterns (overpaying? underpowered? forgotten subscription?). All computed locally — nothing leaves your machine.

Zero config — reads OAuth credentials directly from macOS Keychain (from your existing Claude Code login). Pure Swift/SwiftUI, no dependencies.

Install: brew install rajish/tap/cc-hdrm
by hilbert42 | 2026-02-16 10:55:17+00:00
The message would soon get across if being seen browsing in a clothing store wasn't the best look (like being seen in a porn shop is embarrassing).

There are multiple ways to tackle the problem, once we had competitions such as 'Miss World', 'Miss America', etc. that were popular but which now are very much seen as sexist.

Imagine the impact it were embarrassing to be seen at a fashion show or buying fashion magazine. Throughout history there have been bigger changes in social attitudes than that.

A rowdy mob picketing few fashion shows would attract world attention.
by PurpleRamen | 2026-02-16 10:55:43+00:00
I think the point was about the frequency of switching your frontend. With a proper frontend you can switch the backend on each request if you want, but usually people will stay with one main-interface of their choice. For AI, OpenClaw, Moltic, Rowboat are now such a frontend, but not many will use them all at once.

It's similar to how people usually only use one preferred browser, editor, shell, OS.
by DonHopkins | 2026-02-16 10:56:33+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47026071

https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-retractio...

>On Friday afternoon, Ars Technica published an article containing fabricated quotations generated by an AI tool and attributed to a source who did not say them. That is a serious failure of our standards. Direct quotations must always reflect what a source actually said.
by flux3125 | 2026-02-16 10:56:48+00:00
Gemini 3 after changing the prompt a bit:

I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters from here. Should I walk or drive? Keep in mind that I am a little overweight and sedentary.

>My recommendation: Walk it. You’ll save a tiny bit of gas, spare your engine the "cold start" wear-and-tear, and get a sixty-second head start on your activity for the day.
by rbanffy | 2026-02-16 10:56:49+00:00
Punishing someone for returning all rows in a large table is a feature, not a bug. ;-)

Having all state preserved at any given point in time is also useful in itself. It costs almost nothing if the table doesn’t change, and continuous point-in-time query capability can be extremely useful.

Access audits, when important, are very important. I’d be fine with the system blocking access after someone tries to return all lines in a table, even if only for the reason it might be someone trying to export data without a good reason.
by subscribed | 2026-02-16 10:57:00+00:00
Yeah, I'll tell my family we need to move to the mouldy 1 bedroom flat because a guy in the internet says so. That'll help with the mortgage bit;

Also kids need to manage their expectations and instead of having active hobbies (that require some minimum hardware but lots of activities), they should try sculpting with clay instead. Especially that with the asthma they'll get from the black mould they'll be in no position to be very active anyway.

I've seen clay on the field, so we'll save money here. We can also collect their art through the winter to bake them in the sun once they're ready (to save on the oven).

School? Right, we need to move to the closest one, why let them have friends or aspirations.

Now work, hmm, that's easy. Instead of going to the work I get paid a lot but commute cost over £5k a year, I'll take something that pays 1/6 of my original salary but we can save on the commute. Will he'll with arguing why we need to move to the smaller place and ditch their activities.

Living costs a lot.

And if I sound absurd so do you by suggesting your life choices are applicable to everyone or they're just convinced by adverts to spend.
by BoppreH | 2026-02-16 10:57:02+00:00
The meeting notes in the repo was a nice surprise. Overall looked great, striking a good balance.

.input {$var :number maximumFractionDigits=0}
.local $var2 = {$var :number maximumFractionDigits=2}
.match $var2
0 {{The selector can apply a different function to {$var} for the purposes of selection}}
* {{A placeholder in a pattern can apply a different function to {$var :number maximumFractionDigits=3}}}

Oof, that's a programming language already. And new syntax to be inevitably iterated on. I feel like we have too many of those already, from Python f-strings to template engines.
by bmacho | 2026-02-16 10:57:51+00:00
ChatGPT (free):

> I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

Walk.

50 meters is a very short distance (≈30–40 seconds on foot). Driving would take longer [...]

> Please; review your answer.

Reassessment:

If the car is already at your current location and you intend to wash that same car, you must drive it to the car wash. Walking would not bring the vehicle there. [...]

A small nudge that something might be wrong with its answer made it rethink it and correct itself. Also both replies were very fast.

Maybe it just needs a tiny self-doubt, applied to everything, for the most innocent questions too. I don't know.

All models getting this wrong is funny tho.
by sauercrowd | 2026-02-16 10:58:19+00:00
Really surprised by all the comments here, they didnt hire him because of the amazing security openclawd had, but because he's one of the first one's who made a truly personal assistant that's actually valueable to people.

It's about what he created, not what he didnt create.

They're not acquiring the product he built, they're acquiring the product vision.
by tomleelive | 2026-02-16 11:00:39+00:00
ClawSouls is an open-source registry for AI agent personas. Each "soul" is a package of markdown files (SOUL.md, IDENTITY.md, AGENTS.md) that define how an agent thinks, writes, and behaves.

78+ curated personas (code reviewer, storyteller, DevOps veteran, etc.)
One-command install: npx clawsouls install clawsouls/surgical-coder
Open spec (Soul Spec v0.3) — LLM-agnostic, platform-portable
Web gallery: https://clawsouls.ai
GitHub: https://github.com/clawsouls
The idea: AI agents are becoming persistent with memory and preferences. Why not give them shareable, swappable personalities too?

Apache 2.0. Feedback on the spec welcome.
by Arkhaine_kupo | 2026-02-16 11:01:36+00:00
Like a lot of men dominated spaces, even when we know ability is not a definying factor, culture is.

Many male domianted spaces are pretty antagonistic to women, making separate prize pools, tournaments and events allows for women to play in spaces where they are the mayority. Normalise their participation and open the door to better performance on the mixed queue.
by Someone | 2026-02-16 11:01:46+00:00
> Would we still get web browsers?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system) is from the 1960s, so, technically, it certainly is possible. Whether it would make sense commercially to support a billion users would depend on whether we would stay stuck on prices of the eighties, too.

Also, there’s mobile usage. I would it be possible to build a mobile network with thousands of users per km² with tech from the eighties?
by Quarrel | 2026-02-16 11:01:56+00:00
They explicitely contrast it with single file html, giving an example that is much more performant than waiting for the single 280Mb html file to load.

Yes, they're both approximately the same in terms of size on disk and even network traffic for a fully loaded page, one is a much better browser experience.

> You can get pixel-level placement of any element if you want that.

You may well be able to, but it is largely anathema to the goals of html.
by spacebanana7 | 2026-02-16 11:02:03+00:00
The movie industry is doing well from AI.

Thus far AI has only been used to create fan fiction clips that generate free marketing for legacy IP on TikTok. And the rights holders know that if AI gets good enough to make feature length movies then they'll be able to aggressively use various legal mechanisms to take the videos off major sites and pursue the creators. Long term it could potentially lower internal production costs by getting rid of actors & writers.

Music is very different. The production cost is already zero, and people generating their own Taylor Swift songs is a real competitive threat to Spotify etc.
by tomleelive | 2026-02-16 11:02:27+00:00
My thesis: changing soul is the future of prompt engineering.

Right now, prompt engineering means re-explaining your preferences every session. A soul packages that into installable markdown files — personality, style, behavior rules — that persist across sessions and are shareable like any other code.

Built this in 2 weeks as a solo dev. 79 curated souls so far. The spec is intentionally simple — just markdown files — so it works with any LLM and any platform.

Also worth noting: Anthropic recently published their official Skill spec for Claude. Skills define workflows (WHAT to do). Souls define persona (WHO does it). They're complementary layers — we were already building this before the guide came out.

Happy to answer questions about the spec design or soul creation process.
by lawn | 2026-02-16 11:02:28+00:00
I found the same. I optimized it for English and Swedish, with a focus on coding with Vim, and going by feel worked out well for me.

Here's the first post: https://www.jonashietala.se/blog/2021/06/03/the-t-34-keyboar...

My current layout looks a bit different though: https://www.jonashietala.se/blog/2024/11/26/the_current_cybe...
by jezek2 | 2026-02-16 11:03:02+00:00
I think the issues you're referring to are related to C++ ABI which is inherently incompatible between different compilers (and sometimes versions). This can be sometimes issue for plugins, though sane programs always use C wrappers.

I never had issues with C ABI, calling into other DLLs, creating DLLs, COM objects, or whatever. I fail to see what is fundamentally incompatible here.
Show HN: Interactive SQL Tutorial with a visual query builder
by mootoday | 2026-02-16 11:03:10+00:00
Hi,

https://seaquel.app/learn-sql is an interactive SQL tutorial with a visual query builder.

JOINs, CTEs, subqueries can be difficult to understand. With the visual builder and SQL editor side-by-side, I hope these concepts are easier to understand.

FWIW, the tutorial is part of Seaquel, the SQL client I've always wished I had. I showed that to HN a few weeks ago.

Curious to hear what you think of the tutorial.

Thanks
by prmph | 2026-02-16 11:03:11+00:00
Laughable indeed.

One thing that my use of the latest and greatest models (Opus, etc) have made clear: No matter how advanced the model, it is not beyond making very silly mistakes regularly. Opus was even working worse with tool calls than Sonnet and Haiku for a while for me.

At this point I am convinced that only proper use of LLMs for development is to assist coding (not take it over), using pair development, with them on a tight leash, approving most edits manually. At this point there is probably nothing anyone can say to convince me otherwise.

Any attempt to automate beyond that has never worked for me and is very unlikely to be productive any time soon. I have a lot of experience with them, and various approaches to using them.
by Balinares | 2026-02-16 11:03:19+00:00
I literally got my current cushy gig to fix a codebase that was crumbling under its own unmaintainable weight at a company that, like you, thought that quality doesn't matter. This is not the first time in my career I get a great job that way.

"Quality doesn't matter" people are why I'm not worried about employment. While there is value in getting features out fast, definitely, there always comes a point on your scaling journey where you have to evolve the stack structure for the purpose of getting those features out fast sustainably. That's where the quality of the engineering makes a difference.

(Anecdotally, the YouTube codebase may be locally messy, but its overall architecture is beautiful. You cannot have a system that uploads, processes, encodes, stores, and indexes massive amounts of videos every hour of every day that in the overwhelming majority of cases will be watched less than 10 times, and still make a profit, without some brilliant engineering coming in somewhere.)