MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cj | 2026-02-03 19:56:56+00:00
This is intersting.

Occasionally in YC founder circles a new founder will raise a bunch of money and then ask something like "What's the best way to invest all the money our company just raised?"

The responses are always along the lines of "Your startup is already risky. Don't innovate in areas of your business where the status quo is known to work. Innovate your product + technology, don't be innovative with your company's finances, HR, etc"

That advice always stuck with me. It just makes a lot of sense to do things in the most boring way possible, except where it matters (your competitive advantage <-- that's where you innovate, that's where you set yourself apart)

Running a startup is distracting enough. Doing things non-standard just adds to the list of distractions that you don't need as a founder.
by mystifyingpoi | 2026-02-03 19:57:14+00:00
> and lag constantly on modern hardware

This. Opening a chat for the first time in the morning consistently takes 5-10 seconds. Opening subsequent ones takes 2-3 seconds. That is, if they contain plain text. If not, UI keps reflowing and jumping while thumbnails and silly gifs are loaded async, so you cannot even reliably click.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-03 19:57:28+00:00
> for typical usage of Claude Code vs. typical usage of another CLI dev tool.

The type of people who go out of their way to use tools like OpenCode are likely deep into the long tail of the usage curve.

In other words, their usage isn't typical of their monthly plan subscribers. They've no doubt built the pricing and limits according to their average customers, not the people looking for a cheaper API to use because they consume large amounts of tokens.

If they had to price the plans according to how the average OpenCode API CLI coding user used the tools, the price would be higher or limits would be lower.

It was never sold as a general-purpose API for any tools to use. You could ignore the monthly fee plans entirely and compare providers based on API requests if the goal was general purpose use.

This is a strange situation where people are ultimately complaining that a company has decided to offer us a discount on something. If they had required API pay-per-request for Claude Code or made the plans $1000/month we wouldn't have any of these complaints, ironically.
by 4corners4sides | 2026-02-03 19:57:32+00:00
The number one principle of the author’s philosophy is that anything that a user can do through a UI an agent should be able to do through a sequence of tool calls. I agree with this and I think if every old and bespoke UI exposed such an atomic API the world would be a better place. Maybe the AI gold rush can force companies to make their apps more programmable.

The optimisation hierarchy in the article is also cool going from:

Agent composes atomic tools to achieve actions

Agent invokes domain specific skills

Agent flow is translated into code

Code is optimised in a lower level language

…

Assembly?

I like how it extends our normal notion of optimisation with new “agentic programs” which are nothing but model intelligence, simple but powerful tools and user intent.

Ultimately I couldn’t finish the article. “This isn't about a one-to-one mapping of UI buttons to tools—it's about achieving the same outcome”. Everytime I read contrast framing I take psychological damage and it really really hurts. Sometimes I feel like contrast framing is left in as a conspiracy by AI companies to easily make known people who are so lazy that they can’t even be bothered asking their agents to omit it. Like a watermark hidden in plain sight….

The article in fairness says that it was authored by Claude. And you can tell. When I first saw that the article was co-written by Claude I actually thought that it would be better thought out and structured. Surely, if somebody is brave enough to admit that they used AI for a blog, where the author’s voice is valued so highly, it must mean that they have cracked the code and produced something truly magnificent and they want to show it off! How wrong I was.
by riku_iki | 2026-02-03 19:57:42+00:00
> Never? For the sheer amount of moonshot bets he's doing, his track record would make any VC jealous. Zip2, PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, Grok/xAI.

not never, but xAI is not clear if successful, and others were bootstrapped 10 years ago, and not clear if they need mask at this point.
by dabedee | 2026-02-03 19:57:44+00:00
Email migration is genuinely painful and I am sure there's a real market here, so I am not trying to discourage you. But why should I trust a third party with my IMAP credentials?

"Credentials encrypted in memory only and deleted immediately after migration".

I have no way to audit/verify this claim. You're essentially asking users to hand over the keys to their entire email history on faith.
by some_random | 2026-02-03 19:57:57+00:00
They're busy planning domestic terrorism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretchen_Whitmer_kidnapping_pl...), entrapping the mentally ill (https://archive.vn/riFSI), etc.

In all seriousness, this is probably an international crime and they just do not have the resources to chase them all down.
by daveguy | 2026-02-03 19:57:58+00:00
Independent audits aren't arbitrary. They're the standard by which you can tell whether an organization is lying about their finances. Double entry accounting and receipts makes it pretty difficult to fake especially when the claim is as simple as "don't worry, we hold the backing value in treasuries." Of course, the independent part has to be truly independent and not paid for by the audited. They refuse.
by jdgiese | 2026-02-03 19:58:03+00:00
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by mandevil | 2026-02-03 19:58:05+00:00
During the Free Banking era of US history (from when Andrew Jackson killed the 2nd National Bank until the Civil War, roughly 1837-1863) essentially every company that could get their state to give them a bank charter (very very poorly regulated) could issue its own paper notes that were treated as currency, with the very poor state regulation alone responsible for ensuring that they didn't print more notes than they had specie to back up.

You'll never guess, but most banks didn't actually have enough specie to back their notes, and banks constantly failed during the Free Banking era. If a bank failed then the notes value went to zero, and so notes always traded at a discount to their face value, and there were even brokers who were paid by local merchants to give them the latest correct discount rates for all the local banks (updating daily), and if a bank note got far enough away from the bank that the local broker didn't know about it, well, then it wouldn't be accepted by a local merchant. So effectively a similar result here in the capitalist, non-aristocratic US for about 15 years.

This is an enormous amount of overhead in actually running an economy, which was why it was ended and we had the National Banking Acts of 1863 and 1864 to try to create a more uniform currency, and the Bureau of Engraving and Printing created in 1862, etc. Because the actual businesses started to demand simpler accounting, and so more financial regulation of the banks. (1)

1: There were four truly productive eras in American legislative history, roughly the 1860's, the 1910's, the 1930's, and the 1960's. The first was because all of the Southerners left Congress during the Civil War, so the people who stayed behind agreed on a lot of things. The 1930's and 1960's were the result of massive majorities for one party in Congress, so the people who were in office agreed on a lot of things. The 1910's were a brief period where a couple of critical issues- most prominently women's suffrage and prohibition- scrambled traditional parties and there were weird coalitions that suddenly sprang up- and just as suddenly collapsed. Other than those periods, the American system of government with its many veto points has very produced very limited results.
by JohnMakin | 2026-02-03 19:58:14+00:00
I agree with this and it's a conversation I've struggled to have with coworkers about using these -

IMO it's great if a plugin wants to have their own conventions for how to name and where to put these files and their general structure. I get the sense it doesn't matter to agents much (talking mostly claude here) and the way I use it I essentially give its own "skills" based on my own convention. It's very flexible and seems to work. I don't use the slash commands, I just script with prompts into claude CLI mostly, so if that's the only thing I gain from it, meh. I do see other comments speculating these skills work more efficiently but I'm not sure I have seen any evidence for that? Like a sibling comment noted I can just re-feed the skill knowledge back into the prompt.
by KPGv2 | 2026-02-03 19:58:28+00:00
Literacy shouldn't matter for the definition of knowing a language anyway. Orthography isn't language. It's a symbolic notation that represents a language. Blind people don't speak a different language from non-blind people. Illiterate people can still speak language. Children still speak language. Humans in societies where writing systems do not exist still can speak language.

Writing a language makes you more skilled at living in the modern world. It's not a threshold past which you must travel to count as a speaker of that language.
by ravishq | 2026-02-03 19:58:30+00:00
Open sourcing a STARK/FRI proof-of-computation for sequential SHA-256 hash chains.

Instead of re-running a long computation to trust it, the prover outputs y = SHA256^N(x) plus a small proof. Anyone can verify the claim quickly.

Measured on Apple M4 (release):

Proof size: 312 bytes (constant for tested sizes)

Verification: ~18µs p95 (constant for tested sizes)

Benchmarked for N=256..2048 in the public bundle

Try it locally (this is the main thing):

cd opoch-poc-sha/rust-verifier; ./public_bundle/replay.sh
Artifacts: public_bundle/report.json (benchmarks), public_bundle/soundness.json (parameters + soundness), and official FIPS SHA-256 vectors.

Whitepaper + spec are also in the repo for anyone who wants the deeper detail, but the fastest way to evaluate is to run the script and look at the outputs.

We’ll hang out in the comments as an AMA. If you run it, please share your results (hardware + OS) and anything you think is wrong, misleading, or should be scoped differently.

Repo: https://github.com/chetannothingness/opoch-hash
by skissane | 2026-02-03 19:58:59+00:00
> No, the United States doesnt have a central land registry because that is not an enumerated power of the federal government.

I think you misunderstood the post you were replying to. Torrens title was invented in Australia. Just like in the US, land titles are a state responsibility in Australia not a federal one. But each state has a central statewide land registry which is the authoritative source of truth for land ownership. By contrast, US states hold land title records in a decentralised way (at the local government level not the state level), and those records aren’t legally decisive.

Most common law jurisdictions have centralised land titles, but often centralised at one level below the national government.
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-02-03 19:59:19+00:00
Really well targeted!

I'd been thinking of using toolbox or devcontainers going forward, but having to craft containers with all my stuff sounds so painful, feels like it would become another full-time job to make containers

Bubblewrap & passing in a bunch of the current system sounds like a great compromise!

I do wonder what isolation something like systemd-run can offer, if that is enough.

Part #2 to me, I also want observability as to what the agent changed. That was one place where containers are such a clear & huge advantage! Having an overlay that contains the changes to the filesystem is so explicit. There's also works like agentfs, that offer a FUSE filesystem backed by Turso DB (sqlite compatible).
by ambonvik | 2026-02-03 19:59:24+00:00
They probably do, but I have not used them. My approach has been "offensive programming", to put in asserts for preconditions, invariants, and postconditions wherever possible. If anything starts to smell, I'd like to stop it cold and fix it rather than trying to figure it out later. With two levels of concurrency in a shared memory space it could get hairy fast if bugs were allowed to propagate to elsewhere before crashing something.

Not familiar with the details of Intel CET, but this is basically just implementing what others call fibers or "green threads", so any such special handling should certainly be possible if necessary.
by skapadia | 2026-02-03 19:59:30+00:00
Thanks, I'll try those out. I've used Codex CLI itself on a few small projects as well, and fired it up on a feature branch where I had it implement the same feature that Claude Code did (they didn't see each other's implementations). For that specific case, the implementation Codex produced was simpler, and better for the immediate requirements. However, Claude's more abstracted solution may have held up better to changing requirements. Codex feels more reserved than Claude Code, which can be good or bad depending on the task.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-02-03 20:00:08+00:00
Not just wholesale crashes, but all sorts of misbehavior. For example, cheap WiFi/BT/ethernet can wreak havoc on your connectivity and out of spec USB peripherals can cause all sorts of problems. Both can bring sleep/power saving problems.

Most people using computers aren't technical enough to be able to discern these things, however, and many buy the cheapest thing on the shelf and so these subpar components persist.
by MillionOClock | 2026-02-03 20:00:13+00:00
Multiple config files of Xcode projects are not publicly documented as far as I remember and personally I have preferred to require my agents not to modify them out of fear it might break something and be hard to fix. I don't know how agentic programming will work in Xcode but I would expect it to do it using a safer approach, so that's also another case where it might have an advantage.

Your workflow looks very interesting especially the describe_ui part, are you already able to do this today?
by wvenable | 2026-02-03 20:00:35+00:00
> Yes they did. Kilo- means 1000 in SI/metric.

I'm happy to say it isn't an SI unit. Kilo meaning 1000 makes no sense for computers, so lets just never do that.

> Therefore, use IEC 60027 prefixes like kibi-,

No. They're dumb. They sound stupid, they were decades too late, etc. This was a stupid plan. We can define Kilo as 1024 for computers -- we could have done that easily -- and just don't call them SI units if that makes people weird. This is how we all actually work. So rather than be pedantic about it lets make the language and units reflect their actual usage. Easy.
by x0x0 | 2026-02-03 20:00:43+00:00
That kinda makes sense (and thank you!), but I think the comprehensive incompetence is thus:

1 - fails
2 - w/ no useful feedback to user;
3 - I couldn't get support to tell me why (fine, small account), but the customer with 900 licensed seats couldn't either

Fortunately, said customer has come to the realization of how very bad it is and is hopefully migrating to Slack.
by athrowaway3z | 2026-02-03 20:00:57+00:00
I'm launching a SaaS to create yet another solution to the AI Sandboxing problem in linux.

My friends and I have spent a lot of time quietly injecting support down into the kernel without anybody raising a flag, and we finally have the infrastructure in place to solve this problem.

We have also poisoned all the LLMs training data with our approach, so our marketing is primed and we wont even need to learn Claude to use our tool.

We’re planning a soft launch this month, or maybe next month. Depending on how the "in the vibe" our team can get.

We’re calling it `useradd`.

Yes, the man page is intimidating, and the documentation is terrible. But once you're over the learning curve, it puts your machine into a kind of 'main frame' mode where multiple 'virtual teletypes' and users can operate on the same machine.

DM me if you want a beta key.
by asdf_snar | 2026-02-03 20:01:18+00:00
I'm not stating that they should be. I first want to make sure this is not just a question of the "Real ID". I can think of a couple of reasons that would throw a wrench in the works:

- passengers on no-fly lists or criminals
- anyone who is underage -- do we let 10 year-olds fly alone? how do you assess age without ID? what if the child gets lost while traveling, and you can't even determine whether the child boarded their flight or not? (if you attach ID to the ticket, then that just seems like ID with extra steps? I could be missing something)
- baggage claim: if there is no link between ticket and person, what's to stop me from claiming anyone's luggage as my own?

I'm not firmly attached to any of these objections, actually -- and perhaps they're not even issues, because I'm missing something fundamental about the assumption. I admit my personal bias is that "taking a plane = passport" even when traveling domestically (I'm not a US citizen), so I have not thoroughly considered the possibility that "taking a plane = taking a bus".
by input_sh | 2026-02-03 20:01:36+00:00
That website is specifically to explain it to French audiences.

German version is here, but unlike France they're mostly boosting already-existing German open source software (like Nextcloud and Open Xchange): https://opencode.de/en/home

I don't know how the Netherlands really fits into all of this, but I know they're one of the biggest funders of open source projects in general via NLnet. Seriously, their list of projects they've given money to is ridiculously comprehensive, you're going to struggle naming some that are not listed here: https://nlnet.nl/project/index.html
by jacoblav | 2026-02-03 20:01:44+00:00
Post:
I've been building PDF Insight (https://pdf-insight.com) - an AI tool that answers questions about PDFs and shows exactly where the answer came from.

The core problem: My friend is an accountant. Every tax season he manually ctrl+F's through dozens of client PDFs (T4s, RRSP receipts, bank statements) to extract numbers. I watched him spend 20 minutes finding one RRSP contribution total across 4 documents.

So I built this. Upload multiple PDFs, ask "what's the total RRSP contribution?" and get the answer with yellow highlights on the exact source text.

Technical stack:
- Backend: FastAPI + pdfplumber for text extraction
- PDF rendering: react-pdf with custom highlight overlay positioning
- Chunking: Layout-aware splitting that respects tables and preserves bbox coordinates
- Retrieval: Hybrid approach (BM25 + semantic embeddings + numeric normalization for currency/percentages)

The hard part was highlight precision. Early versions highlighted entire pages. Now it targets specific values (e.g., "$50,000.00") by extracting highlight_targets from the LLM response and matching them to chunk bboxes.

Free tier: 10 queries/month. Would love feedback from anyone who deals with multi-document PDF workflows.
by clarity_hacker | 2026-02-03 20:01:48+00:00
The real value isn't the format itself — it's progressive disclosure. When you dump everything into one monolithic doc, you're burning context tokens on instructions the agent doesn't need for the current task.

Skills as a pattern let the agent scan a lightweight index of descriptions, then pull in the full instructions only when relevant. Whether that's a .skills/ folder or a README index pointing to separate docs doesn't matter much. What matters is the separation between "what capabilities exist" and "how to execute this specific one."

The standardization part is mostly useful for distribution — being able to install and share skills across projects without manually wiring them up. Same reason we standardize package formats even though you could just copy-paste code.
by tyre | 2026-02-03 20:01:57+00:00
Yes, they do:

https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2023/06/27/international-...

People globally have routinely acknowledged that:

1. The US is a hegemony that meddles in others’ affairs

2. It does so selfishly, despite the high flying rhetoric about freedom, democracy, etc.

3. This is good

The preconditions for absence of war in Europe came before the EU existed and has to do with the post-WWII balance of power, which was heavily driven by the United States.
by 4corners4sides | 2026-02-03 20:02:00+00:00
Mario’s enthusiasm for his coding agent here and the sheer surface area of the pi project reminds me of how in a bygone era people used to fawn over their own text editors, the features that they implemented, their macros and speed of editing, lightweightness .etc. Coding agents may be the new “text editor” and the “emacs” vs. “vim” vs. “vscode” wars can finally be put to rest. The ubiquity of vscode already made the “emacs” vs. “vim” debate more of a shouting match between a bundle of contrarian geriatrics. The power of coding agents and the new era of “automatic programming” may be the final nail in the coffin for these lumbering piles of legacy inertia which we now have all the power to replace but no real need. For why should we use the means of mass production to support the rickety home shops of the past?

Anyway, more on the actual article what he’s done is really cool and features a lot of stuff that has proven to work at the forefront of automatic programming – he has a massive test suite against all major model providers, he runs his agent against known eval suites as well.
by garyfirestorm | 2026-02-03 20:02:05+00:00
It was about immigration. I remember around 2015 when I was on F1 visa - in Michigan - you could get drivers license and it would expire when your visa expired. However my few lucky friends in NY/NJ/CA? Just got blanket 5yr expiry on their licenses from the day of renewal.
I.E. their visas could expire well before their ‘IDs’ could.
RealID was introduced to eliminate these discrepancies. And to get a realId now you need to show your visa documents/approvals.
by panick21_ | 2026-02-03 20:02:15+00:00
The reason you can't run as many other trains on WCML and other lines is because high-speed non-stop trains take so much capacity. Once you remove them, you can run many more local/regional trains with more stops and higher frequency.

The whole way HS2 is designed is to maximally reduce the amount of fast trains going north south on the existing network. Leading to a massive capacity upgrade on the existing lines. You can still run some express lines but likely much more lines that stop at more station, making it fast for you to go to next HS2 stop and from there to the further distance destination.

HS2 connection to Leeds was designed to help the ECML, the whole HS2 system was designed by experts to help with WCML and ECML.

Of course now that the former car brained fucking moron of a prime minister in his last attempt to safe himself canceled most of HS2 all those benefits are gone. And labor is to cowardly and ignorant to bring it back.