MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
I built a free alternative to Datadog Synthetic Monitoring using Playwright
by rizqtek | 2026-02-17 10:11:28+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm Vajid, the founder of a small dev agency.

I built this tool because I got tired of the "200 OK" lie. We had a client whose e-commerce site was "Up" (returning 200 status codes), but the "Add to Cart" button was broken due to a silent JavaScript error. They lost sales for 6 hours while our dashboard said "All Systems Operational."

Existing tools like Datadog Synthetic Monitoring are excellent but can be expensive for indie hackers or small startups (often ~$15/check).

So I built a lightweight alternative using Playwright, Node.js, and BullMQ.

How it works:

It spins up a headless browser instance.

It navigates to your URL and waits for specific DOM elements (not just HTTP status).

It captures screenshots and console logs if the specific flow (like Login or Checkout) fails.

The Business Model (Transparency):
I am not trying to become the next Datadog. I run a dev agency, and this tool acts as a "loss leader" to demonstrate our competence to potential enterprise clients. That’s why the core monitoring is free for the community.

I’m currently paying for the infrastructure (DigitalOcean) myself. I have some spare capacity, so if you are working on a student project or open-source tool and need hosting/monitoring, let me know—I’m happy to support 5-10 projects with free credits.

I’d love feedback on the false-positive handling (currently looking into smarter DOM diffing).

– Vajid
by rustyhancock | 2026-02-17 10:12:05+00:00
I've a similar history of AI use as you but every so often I simply describe what I want and try out what it creates. Honestly in these past 2 years the pace of improvement has been stunning.

Yesterday I was inside one of the tools that a just build it prompt created and I asked it to use a NewType pattern for some of the internals.

It wasn't until I was in bed that I thought why? If I'm never reading that code and the agent doesn't benefit from it? Why am I dragging my cognitive baggage into the code base?

Would a future lay vibe coder care what a New type pattern is? Why it helps? Who it helps?

I think the pedagogy of programming will change so that effective prompting will be more accessible.
by fnands | 2026-02-17 10:12:18+00:00
First they came for the GPUs, but I did not speak out, for I was not a gamer.

Then they came for the RAM, but I did not speak out, for I had already closed Firefox.

Then they came for the hard drives, but I did not speak out, for I had the cloud.

Then my NAS died, and there was no drive left to restore from backup.
by tokioyoyo | 2026-02-17 10:13:06+00:00
Ok, to be very honest I wrote that in the middle of having a couple of drinks. I guess, what I mean is, countries are funding AI labs because it can turn into a “winner-takes-it-all” competition. Unless the country starts blocking the leading providers.

Private companies will turn towards the best, fastest, cheapest (or some average of them). Country borders don’t really matter. All labs are fighting to get the best thing out in the public for that reason, because winning comes with money, status, prestige, and actually changing the world. This kind of incentives are rare.
by danlitt | 2026-02-17 10:13:38+00:00
> I don't think anyone disputes that if you very significantly increase exercise but also maintain calorific input then you will lose weight

This is exactly what is disputed by the link you posted. They measured directly the energy expenditure (the number of calories burned by respiration) in a high-activity hunter-gatherer tribe, and in relatively low-activity industrialized societies, and found they were almost the same. So the number of calories the people consumed was not measured or relevant (and must also have been roughly the same if neither group was actively gaining weight).
by kubanczyk | 2026-02-17 10:14:27+00:00
It's a binary consideration if you think of it rather than hexadecimal.

If you have to prominently represent 10 things in binary, then it's neat to allocate slot of size 16 and pad the remaining 6 items. Which is to say it's neat to proceed from all zeroes:

x x x x 0 0 0 0
x x x x 0 0 0 1
x x x x 0 0 1 0
....
x x x x 1 1 1 1

It's more of a cause for hexadecimal notation than an effect of it.
by overfeed | 2026-02-17 10:14:31+00:00
U can't believe I didn't know this!

I got curious on how they solved contributions since "public domain" means different things in different jurisdictions[0] - unlike copyright. It turns out they didn't solve it - there's a subsection on the SQLite that declares it is "Open Source, nor Open Contribution[1]". Much like Android, this follows the letter of Open Source, but not the spirit of it.

I'll stand by my earlier assertion; wrangling public domain AI contributions is an even gnarlier problem to solve.

0. Indeed, it may even be non-existent. Maintainers would want to protect the project from being "infected" by contributions with permaglued-copyright.

1. https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html
Show HN: PgCortex – AI enrichment per Postgres row, zero transaction blocking
by supreeth_ravi | 2026-02-17 10:14:41+00:00
Hi HN,

Been working on a way to get "agent-per-row" behavior in Postgres without actually running LLMs inside the database.

The problem: Calling LLMs from triggers/functions blocks transactions, exhausts connections, and breaks ACID. Saw some projects doing this and it felt dangerous for production.

The solution: DB-adjacent architecture. Lightweight triggers enqueue jobs to an outbox table. An external Python worker (agentd) polls, executes AI calls, and writes back safely with schema validation and CAS.

What you can build:

Auto-classify support tickets on INSERT

Content moderation that doesn't block your app

Lead scoring, fraud detection, and invoice extraction

Anything where data arrives and needs AI enrichment

Works with OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenRouter, or any Agent.

One SQL line to add AI to any table:

SELECT agent_runtime.agent_watch('tickets', 'id', 'classifier', 'v1', '{"priority":"$.priority"}');

Includes 9 example use cases in the repo. Would love feedback on the architecture.
by rdsubhas | 2026-02-17 10:14:52+00:00
> Interest rates are relatively high compared to what they were several years ago.

And compared to last 50 years, Interest rates are still WAY lower, and unemployment is still WAY higher.

Make no mistake: Sure, the "curve" of unemployment trends downwards as interest rates drop [1]. But the "base" of unemployment is constantly increasing with each cycle [2]. There is no reality of unemployment rate going back to what it was before.

It's easy to be unaware of this pattern if one is constantly re-employed and never part of the 27-week unemployed graph, or if the point of reference is just the post-2000 or post-2008 crisis.

But 20% baseline of people who are unemployed more than 27 weeks. Let that sink in. It's pretty insane. And that baseline is only increasing.

What the OP commenter says has truth in data to it: Unemployment increase is not a linear scale of a working society. It's driven by tipping points where major changes happen (e.g. the current political changes in US).

Sources:

1. Unemployment rate last 50 years FRED graph: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS13025703

2. Interest rate last 50 years FRED graph: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DFF
by fastily | 2026-02-17 10:15:24+00:00
If component prices keep going up and the respective monopoly/duopoly/triopoly for each component colludes to keep prices high/supply constrained, then eventually devices will become too expensive for the average consumer. So what’s the game plan here? Are companies planning to let users lease a device from them? Worth noting that Sony already lets you do this with a ps5. Sounds like we’re headed towards a “you will own nothing and be happy” type situation
by olavgg | 2026-02-17 10:15:26+00:00
We aren't just dealing with a shortage; we're dealing with a monopsony. The Big tech companies have moved from being "customers" of the hardware industry to being the "owners" of the supply chain. The shortage isn't just "high demand", but "contractual lock-out."

It is time to talk seriously about breaking up the hyperscalers. If we don't address the structural dominance of hyperscalers over the physical supply chain, "Personal Computing" is going to become a luxury of the past, and we’ll all be terminal-renters in someone else's data center.
by vidarh | 2026-02-17 10:15:45+00:00
Without measuring quality of output, this seems irrelevant to me.

My use of CLAUDE.md is to get Claude to avoid making stupid mistakes that will require subsequent refactoring or cleanup passes.

Performance is not a consideration.

If anything, beyond CLAUDE.md I add agent harnesses that often increase the time and tokens used many times over, because my time is more expensive than the agents.
by 72deluxe | 2026-02-17 10:17:13+00:00
I am of the same opinion watching them attempt to use modern UIs. When Windows 3.11 was released, it came with a manual that told you how everything worked, and how to interact with it. Windows 95 was also exceptionally logical.

The modern UIs are awful, since buttons sometimes look like links, scrollbars randomly disappear (and their direction for mouse scrolling is opposite to what they were for decades), interaction requires gestures that are not obvious at all, and all of this is even worse on a touchscreen where you are reduced to groping and fumbling around with it - who would know that swiping left or right on a list element means "delete"??

Poor show all round. It is an endemic problem where modern OS manufacturers change interactions every couple of releases, marginally enough to make the object irritating and useless to use.
by Maxion | 2026-02-17 10:18:38+00:00
> Why is this allowed on HN?

1) The comment you replied to is 1 minute old, that is fast for any system to detect weird comments

2) There's no easy and sure-fire way to detect LLM content. Here's wikipedias list of tells https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
by netdevphoenix | 2026-02-17 10:19:37+00:00
Why would they? Github has 28 million public repos, Codeberg only hit 300k last year. Anyway, Codeberg was just a placeholder for 'repo source _less_ likely to be in their training data'. Codeberg was quick candidate for a place to find a big old codebase with non-sensitive data.

It is indeed hard but the guys at Codeberg are certainly an order of magnitude better than Github as they opted out of the main AI crawlers, regularly block IPs known to belong to AI startups and they allow you to make your repos only be accessible to logged in users.

You seem be going on a tangent, here. Main point was about performing a well documented test anyway.
Show HN: Help Me Write AI – an assistant to help you write
by mda_damico | 2026-02-17 10:19:48+00:00
This Chrome extension lets you select text in any editable field—emails, docs, support tools, forms, CRMs, or social posts—and apply AI-powered recipes to transform it in one click.

Built for universal use across the web, it has a powerful custom twist: recipes = prompt + context, ensuring consistent results every time.

A Google account is required for sending API requests. It's free for up to 5 requests per day and paid for more. It's a new product, so feedback is welcome!
by bilekas | 2026-02-17 10:19:54+00:00
> "Personal Computing" is going to become a luxury of the past, and we’ll all be terminal-renters in someone else's data center.

This is the game plan of course, why have customers pay one time for hardware when they can have you constantly feed them money over the long term. Shareholders want this model.

It started with planned obsolescence, now this new model is the natural progression.. There is no obsolescence even in discussion when you're only option is to rent a service, that the provider has no incentive to even make competitive.

I really feel this will be China's moment to flood the market with hardware and improve their quality over time.
by m132 | 2026-02-17 10:20:31+00:00
I've been daily driving Btrfs since 2019 on multiple machines of all sizes, from RAID10 HDD+SSD arrays on larger x86-64 systems, through single SSDs on Armv8-A AArch64, to eMMCs and HDDs in a RAID1 configuration on Armv7-A. I'm a heavy user of snapshots, reflinks, compression and deduplication on all of those systems too.

tl;dr: No data lost, some actually rescued, there still are a few foot guns to watch out for.

It's grown to be a pretty decent file system. In the early days, it was common for it to eat data or catch a lock-up every now and then, but around since Meta took over its maintenance, things have very much stabilized. I haven't personally observed any data loss on my systems that can be attributed to it since 2019. I occasionally run scrub, and it has actually detected a few cases of silent data corruption, which it repaired using a mirror, on some of my HDD-based systems. The only close thing to data loss I've had with it during this time is that a systemd journal file on one of the SSD-based systems somehow ended up with a few extents with an all-zero checksum. The actual file contents don't appear corrupted, however.

As far as the raw I/O performance goes, it's alright; acceptable as in no random lockups, but won't top any benchmarks [1]. One thing to pay attention to is to never have a lot of snapshots if you have quotas enabled. You can either have a snapshot-heavy configuration or quotas, not both. Going against this will have your system slow down to a crawl. There's technically this new feature that allows for a simpler quota accounting scheme, which should in theory solve performance issues, but I haven't tried it myself [2].

Another performance footgun: write-heavy files with No_COW/nodatacow unset. Those are most commonly VM disk images and databases. Due to the copy-on-write design of Btrfs, those files are very susceptible to high fragmentation. While disabling COW defeats most of the benefits of using such a file system, on Btrfs, you can apply it to a small subset of files as a workaround for fragmentation while keeping the rest of your files covered. Take a look at chattr(1), namely the +C option, and always verify if it was applied with lsattr(1). Btrfs only allows this attribute to be changed on directories (which will have new files inherit it) and files with no extents.

As for data safety footguns, don't use RAID5/6. They're still broken [3]. Everything else works without a problem [4]. In the past, there used to be another thing that was a big no-no, namely exposing a host to 2 different file systems with the same ID. Btrfs would traditionally recognize them as one file system in a RAID configuration, and things would go haywire from there. This was particularly annoying with block-level snapshots, like those of LVM. This is said to have been fixed now [5]. As always though, take backups!

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-617-filesystems/3

[2] https://lwn.net/Articles/944371/

[3] https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/btrfs-man5.html#raid5...

[4] https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Status.html

[5] https://lwn.net/Articles/930944/
by 72deluxe | 2026-02-17 10:20:37+00:00
With the lack of polish and attention to detail I see in Tahoe, I for one am really glad I stayed on Sequoia! They need a "Snow Leopard" release - zero new features, hundreds of bug fixes.

I guess it's why they built the new headquarters as a donut shape so that issues can go round and round and round and round forever
by k9294 | 2026-02-17 10:23:23+00:00
I'm building in the same space, Workin on https://ottex.ai - It's a free STT app, with local models and BYOK support (OpenRouter, Groq, Mistral, and more).

The top feature is the per-app custom settings - you can peak different models and instructions for different apps and websites.

- I use the Parakeet fast model when working with Claude Code (VS Code app).
- And I use a smart one when I draft notes in Obsidian. I have a prompt to clean up my rambling and format the result with proper Markdown, very convenient.

One more cool thing is that it allows me to use LLMs with audio input modalities directly (not as text post-processing). e.g. It sends the audio to Gemini and prompts it to transcribe, format, etc., in one run. I find it a bit slow to work with CC, but it is the absolute best model in terms of accuracy, understanding, and formatting. It is the only model I trust to understand what I meant and produce the correct result, even when I use multiple languages, tech terms, etc.
by kkfx | 2026-02-17 10:24:34+00:00
I agree but... I've tried self hosting Matrix, messy. I manage to get it running on my NixOS homeserver, it works, but Livekit is very limited, Coturn seems not that stable to traverse NAT occasionally for reasons I still don't know, video quality is a joke. XMPP? Well, it's even harder to self-host. Mumble is much easier (at least, for me) but lack the ability to call, and that's what I'm looking for.

I've also tried the plain old Asterisk with deskphones and softphone, a nice journey, but not something that could possibly succeed.

I line Nostr, but... So far it lack way to much clients to be used on scale, meaning the reasoning that a scrap of text is the center of our information/communication needs is very nice. But... Most clients are or buggy and limited or monsters not much less buggy. Long-form notes to makes personal blogs seems to be neglected, emails equivalent seems to be just an unfinished and abandoned experiment. The media part is still to be seen in realist usage terms.

So well... The problem of protocols is that lacking a decently feature complete simple app, easy to deploy from go install/pip install/cargo build without a gazillion of deps and different services, easy to package for distro the result is a messy ecosystem only some devs explore to explore, not really to use "in production" and there is so no option to really grow big.
by thisislife2 | 2026-02-17 10:26:00+00:00
You missed the obvious - foreign workers can be exploited by paying them less. Are there Americans with an engineering degrees that are also willing to work for 10+ hours daily, at $150,000 annually, for a job that usually pays $200,000 to $300,000? That is all the H1B (in IT at least) is about - cheap labour, and a potential immigrant pool. Blaming Indians or other Asians for this (like some others do here) is just stupid politics. "Indians hire Indians" is just Indians following company policy to hire cheaper labour.
by kzahel | 2026-02-17 10:26:39+00:00
When I first started using Claude I was pretty annoyed by the cute phrases. But when I built my own wrapper I started using them because I had gotten used to them. But added in a setting of course: [Fun Phrases
Show playful status messages while waiting for responses. Disable to show only "Thinking..."]

Why Anthropic can't provide such a setting, we will never know!
by sixtyj | 2026-02-17 10:26:45+00:00
Everytime I start to discuss LLM/AI with non-IT people it is the same. Absurd expectations. Or denial of AI.

But as CEOs like Altman, Musk or Amodei have some much space in media, they can amplify their products - as good salesmen :)

I think that we are in times similar to 1997-1999, “everything will be web”.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2026-02-17 10:26:58+00:00
We could also vote the policians protecting these uncompetitive markets out of power and let regulators do their job. There has been too many mergers in the component market.

You also have to look at the current status of the market. The level of investment in data centers spurred by AI are unlikely to last unless massive gains materialize. It's pretty clear some manufacturers are betting things will cool down and don't want to overcommit.
by ma1or | 2026-02-17 10:27:33+00:00
Hi HN,

I've been working on a problem that frustrates me with current "Screenshot-to-Code" tools: they are static. They capture the layout, but they miss the behavior (animations, loading states, navigation flow).

So I built a pipeline that treats video as the source of truth.

Instead of analyzing a single frame, the engine parses the video timeline to extract a rudimentary state machine before writing any code. This allows it to reconstruct:

The initial state.

The trigger (click/scroll).

The resulting state (modal open, menu slide-in).

It outputs a clean React + Tailwind project that actually functions, rather than just looking like a picture.

The Update:
High-fidelity video inference is expensive (GPU costs), so I had it gatekept. I just optimized the backend and opened up 2 free reconstructions for everyone because I need to stress-test the model with diverse, real-world edge cases.

You can try it here (no credit card): [LINK DO REPLAY]

I’m looking for feedback specifically on the generated component structure – does the code feel "human-written" to you, or does it still smell like AI spaghetti?

Bash away!
by sinnsro | 2026-02-17 10:27:56+00:00
The core issue with the article is that author mixes up bad management and "fog of management" with the fact that financial results have a disproportionate amount of influence in how things are organised. Every team and employee should do their part to contribute to the financial targets every quarter and within the fiscal year. Which clashes with Deming's points 11b and 12b [1].

_________

1. https://deming.org/explore/fourteen-points/
by kranke155 | 2026-02-17 10:28:07+00:00
You could read The Long Twentieth Century by Giovanni Arrighi.

Fiat money is not the problem, the financialization of economy is actually a common by-product of aging great monetary powers. The US chose to become a monetary power in 1945, rejecting Keynes' Bancor proposal.

Then in 1971, it found it couldn't keep it working, due to the very reasons Keynes explained to them at Bretton Woods. Arrighi argues this has happened 4 times already.

So Fiat money and the financialization of life is just an outcome of something else - that being a monetary superpower is just not sustainable.
by dgxyz | 2026-02-17 10:28:23+00:00
Saw this one coming and got my personal stuff out. It's running on an old Lenovo crate chucked in my hallway.

Work is fucked. 23TB of RAM online. Microservices FTW. Not. Each node has OS overhead. Each pod has language VM overhead. And the architecture can only cost more over time. On top of that "storage is cheap so we won't bother to delete anything". Stupid mentality across the board.
by GreenWatermelon | 2026-02-17 10:28:48+00:00
It's not that the manufacturer can't sell their product, it's that they don't want to do so. They want to get rid of last season's perfectly good product to make room for next season's lineup.

They could sell old stock ay reduced prices and still make profits, but they want to maintain their vain exclusive image, so they inflate their prices by destroying stock.
by ordainedclicks | 2026-02-17 10:28:53+00:00
One of the only big downsides I've noticed with GrapheneOS is that several banking apps don't work with it at all thanks to being tied to Google's verification ecosystem.

Luckily I have hardware 2FA keys from my bank so I can authenticate using that. It also slightly decreases the suck-factor from whenever the phone decides to fly off down a drain. This may not be the case for you, so do your research on what you need for daily living.
by zephen | 2026-02-17 10:29:19+00:00
> I think this is not really true. Or rather, it depends on the UB you are talking about.

I mean, if you're going to argue that a compiler can do anything with any UB, then by all means make that argument.

Otherwise, then no, I don't think it's reasonable for a compiler to cause an infinite loop inside a function simply because that function itself doesn't return a value.