MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sph | 2026-02-16 06:48:48+00:00
> I'm halfway towards setting up my own private mail server and IRC server for me and my friends and kissing the internet goodbye. It was a fun 30 years but we're well into nightmare territory now.

Every day my doomer sentiment deepens, and I am ashamed when I come onto here and see all this optimism. It is refreshing to see people whose opinions I have come to respect on this forum to be as negative as I am.
Fractal Native – doesn't optimize your AI workflow
by slowmonkey | 2026-02-16 06:48:50+00:00
Hello there,

Problem: I wanted to reduce DX friction when using ai to verify that ai-implemented features perform exactly what the developer had in mind. And I'm stuck now...

Context:
First, I thought we could formalize prompts so that they become the code. The idea: a project spec where particular words define behavior, and changing the words changes the program. Each word is a function, so pressing "Go To... (F12)" drops you into a nested behavior (hence "Fractal"). So it would be a meta-spec language interpreted by an ai compiler while still using native language (hence "Native").

But this rests on a wrong assumption — that developers are open to learning a new language (less formalized than TS, Java, or Go, yet still formalized). I don't think that can happen anymore. The next coding language is purely English (or any other natural language).

Second, I discussed the idea with a friend and we realized that tests are a nice descriptor of behaviors (with quite some exceptions ofc). Ideation continued, and long story short, here's the Language Spec: https://github.com/slowestmonkey/fractal/blob/main/README.md

So why am I stuck? I've come to the realization that prompting ai and receiving correct behavior isn't enough for engineer. I can't confidently say "it makes sense" unless I understand how and why it was built that way. Here's the realization: https://www.conjectly.com/thoughts/7

And so I'm asking for help or advice on:
- if and how this idea can go further
- what other wrong assumptions I've made

Please share your thoughts and thank you.
by hilbert42 | 2026-02-16 06:49:16+00:00
"Asking/convincing companies or individuals to be voluntarily ethical, one at a time, is not a solution. ...just increases the opportunity, profits and incentives for less-altruistic actors."

Exactly, it's why we need to reintroduce regulations many of which were removed or weakened from the late 1970s onward. Moreover, we need intelligent regulation not just gut reaction to an immediate problem. That's proving much more difficult (reigning in the excesses of laissez-faire capitalism that were let out of the bag ~50 years ago with deregulation won't be easy).
by vintermann | 2026-02-16 06:49:44+00:00
Apropos Greta Thunberg, I noticed on the top of the "no stupid questions" subreddit the question "How can people like Greta Thunberg afford to be a full time activist?". The submitter was a one-month old account, one of their posts was in the whatismycqs subreddit - a sure tell for bot/farm accounts.
Show HN: LLM AuthZ Audit – find auth gaps and prompt injection in LLM apps
by iamspathan | 2026-02-16 06:50:39+00:00
Hi HN,

I built llm-authz-audit because I kept seeing the same security issues in LLM-powered applications: API keys hardcoded next to OpenAI calls, FastAPI endpoints serving chat completions with zero auth, user input concatenated straight into prompts, and shared conversation memory with no session isolation.

These aren't hypothetical — they're patterns I found repeatedly across open-source LLM projects and production codebases.

What it does:

It's a static analyzer (think eslint/semgrep but purpose-built for LLM security) that scans Python, JavaScript, and TypeScript codebases for authorization and security gaps. It ships with 13 analyzers and 27 rules covering the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications:

- Prompt injection risks (unsanitized input in prompts, missing delimiters)
- Hardcoded API keys (OpenAI, Anthropic, HuggingFace, AWS, generic)
- Unauthenticated LLM endpoints (FastAPI, Flask, Express)
- LangChain/LlamaIndex tools without RBAC
- RAG retrievals without document-level access controls
- Over-permissioned MCP server configs
- Shared conversation memory without user scoping
- Missing rate limiting, audit logging, output filtering
- Credentials forwarded to LLM via prompt templates
Would love feedback from anyone building or securing LLM applications.
by lysace | 2026-02-16 06:51:29+00:00
Not that I wouldn't want Apple to pay ARM more, but,

a) Apple is getting really good at switching CPU architectures when needed.

b) Don't they already have a forever licence to the ARM ISA (since the 90s/Newton) as well as a substantial in-house team? I guess the renegotiations are about future/roadmapped ARM archictural enhancements.

It would be sad if there was a fork of the arm64 ISA.
by Etheryte | 2026-02-16 06:51:49+00:00
People keep parroting this point, but I don't think it actually applies, it's just one of those things that gets reposted a lot on the internet. When we're hiring a candidate, I generally don't go through their Github repos or blogs. I talk to them about what they've worked on and what they've done. Hobby projects can be a good starting point to talk about that, as can be blogs, but really you could start with anything. Most people start with their current day job and that's perfectly fine. You don't have to be coding both inside and outside of working hours do be a good applicant.
by palmotea | 2026-02-16 06:53:19+00:00
> There are only 15 countries worldwide with a higher defence budget than Canada so the budget is hardly tiny...

Canada is pretty big: it's the second-largest country by land-area. Surely there must be certain defense expenditures that need to scale with that?

> In actuality, Canada spends more than twice as much per capita than the world average.

That seems like a twisted measure, due to 1) the land-area issue I mentioned above, and 2) there are a lot of countries in the world that are small and poor, and thus cannot afford a military that can actually defend themselves.

> The only realistic threat to Canada is the new one from Donald Trump...

That's actually not a realistic threat, either.
by quotemstr | 2026-02-16 06:53:33+00:00
> What makes you think that what's cost effective...involves optimally conserving resources

The words "cost" and "effective "perhaps?

> Polluting

Pollution is an economic externality. If I buy a shift and throw it out unworn, I've wasted only my own resources. (I'm paying for the landfill of course.)

You could argue that my wasting that shirt hurt you because I could have instead spent those resources on productive activity that benefits you, and therefore I had a duty to keep it -- but that's just communism with extra steps.
by stevekemp | 2026-02-16 06:54:25+00:00
There's no federal entitlement to being paid if you're sick, so companies come up with their own policies.

So companies often have a strange concept of "sick days", a specific number of days a year you're allowed to be sick. If you're sick more than that you have to use your vacation days, or unpaid leave when you're sick.

(And of course American companies often have weirdness around vacations too. More so in companies where there is allegedly "unlimited time off". But that's kinda off-topic now.)
by Jach | 2026-02-16 06:54:28+00:00
I think the question is different for the typical chess player compared to those at the very top. And at the very top we don't have that much data... going back to Fischer, he had a short career and disappeared by 32, but not really for lack of ability. For Karpov, his reign lasted about 10 years from age 24-34, but even after that he was in the top 3 or top 5 for another 15 years until he retired in his 50s. Kasparov reigned for 20 years, retiring at the top at age 41, and is maybe most impressive for defeating his same-generation rival Karpov while also holding the newcomers of Kramnik and Anand at bay. With Kasparov gone those two battled at the top for another 10ish years into their late 30s and mid-40s respectively (and I'd give the edge to the older Anand) before Magnus won the championship in 2013 and has been dominating for 13 years since. So to summarize, I don't think it's that "impressive" to still be winning at 35, he can probably keep winning for quite some time to come. He probably won't surpass his peak ELO though.
by menaerus | 2026-02-16 06:55:00+00:00
> Who cares if pharmaceutical companies or any other business is slow to adopt the AI, the AI will capture that market entirely making those companies obsolete

It wouldn't because of things which are not of a technical nature. Trials for instance might take much longer than developing the drug. Or complying with whatever regulations of given industry which normally requires some heavy-lifting process which is normally run by humans.
The Idea Archive – a non-profit library for ideas born in feeds
by vijindal | 2026-02-16 06:55:07+00:00
Many good ideas today are born in tweets, threads, blog posts, and personal essays: hypotheses, methods, conceptual models, critiques, partial results. But they live in feeds—personality-driven, ephemeral, hard to search by topic, and almost impossible to cite. If an idea doesn’t become a full paper, it usually just disappears.

The proposal is a non-profit, community knowledge infrastructure that publishes idea-posts the way journals publish papers:

One archived entry = one original post (blog post, thread, essay, etc.)

Only the original author can submit

The post becomes a lightly edited canonical version, approved by the author

Once published, it is frozen forever

Each entry gets a unique, persistent ID (DOI-like) and stable URL

Entries are organized into subject-wise “Idea Journals” across all fields

The result is a permanent, citable record of ideas that would otherwise be lost in feeds. Follow-ups or corrections are new entries, so the system preserves a chronology of ideas rather than endlessly edited pages.

This isn’t a social network, forum, wiki, or preprint server. It’s a publisher + library for ideas: a subject-indexed archive and memory layer for the internet’s best thinking. Discovery is subject-first, author-second.

There’s no heavy peer review—just light editorial curation, with AI assisting filtering and classification. Think library standards, not journal gatekeeping.

I’m not building this myself—sharing it because it feels like missing infrastructure. Does this solve a real problem for you? Does something like this already exist in a form I’ve missed?
by anigbrowl | 2026-02-16 06:55:07+00:00
I've largely disconnected from big tech for years, perhaps 80%, and encouraged others to do likewise. When does the seismic shift happen?

I don't care for these 'bottom up' strategies because they don't have clearly defined success conditions and are more wishing than anything else. It also puts the responsibilities on consumers for 'not advocating (or voting) hard enough,' which imho is just another kind of diffusion of responsibility. Everyone ends up feeling bad for not doing enough to solve the problem when the reality is that coordinating social swarms or other sorts of collective action against tech giants with highly integrated command and lobbying structures is almost impossible.
by NewCzech | 2026-02-16 06:55:08+00:00
People deeply understand the physics of tinfoil hats. A properly constructed tinfoil hat needs two layers, with the shiny sides facing in opposite directions. Only the shiny side reflects brain waves. You need to reflect in both directions: one direction keeps the government from using waves to put ideas in your head; the other is to keep the government from reading your mind.
by alex43578 | 2026-02-16 06:55:21+00:00
The reality of any matching market is based around first impressions and theater. Dating, college apps, hiring, real estate transactions, etc.

Some people just want to buy or sell a house. FSBO with some cheap cellphone pictures will sell far slower than a staged house with professional photos, MLS listing, and a launch party for local agents.

Do many high schoolers care about volunteer work, taking a second language, etc? No. Is it expected to be a part of their application and essay for a good school? Yes.
by troad | 2026-02-16 06:55:21+00:00
> you can try to reason with the people who post comments like the one you're responding to, but the truth is they are just there waiting for anything a regulator does to desparage it, defend corporate and capital, and change nothing about the status quo. The worst part is that they do it thinking they are so edgy for knowing exactly why just another piece of regulation will clearly not work. Funnily enough, the EU track record proves that, apart from some exceptions, these type of regulations work really well. USB-C. Data Roaming across all of Europe. Laws on single use plastics. Etc. But yeah, it's just another regulation! EU BAD!

How about extending others some good faith?

These are political disagreements with decades (centuries?) of history, and unless you're fifteen years old, there's a better explanation for the fact that others disagree with you than "I am the single smartest person in the universe, and all my political opinions are so irrefutably correct that anyone who disagrees must be doing so in bad faith and out of ignorance".

The vast majority of people want what's best for their societies, and have different views as to how best achieve that goal, that arise from diverse life experiences.
by hi_hi | 2026-02-16 06:55:44+00:00
Damn right I'm impatient. My eye starts twitching when a web page takes more than 2 seconds to load :-)

In the meantime, I've had to continuously hear talk about AI, both in real life (like at the local pub) AND virtually (tv/radio/news/whatever) and how it's going to change the world in unimaginable ways for the last...2/3 years. Billions upon billions of dollars are being spent. The only tangible thing we have to show is software development, and some other fairly niche jobs, have changed _a bit_.

So yeah, excuse my impatience for the bubble to burst, I can stop having to hear about this shit every day, and I can go about my job using the new tools we have been gifted, while still doing all the other jobs that sadly do not benefit in any similar way.
by hulitu | 2026-02-16 06:56:14+00:00
ARM is an incompatible pile of mess. On an (X86) PC you can tranfer your disk, as it is, to a new X86 architecture and it will run.

On ARM, every processor has its own bootloader, blobs needed for initialisation. Even the systems have different architecture.
In the end, you need a special software setup, which is not supported more than a few years. See phones, Raspberry PIs and derivatives, Chromebooks.
by gwern | 2026-02-16 06:56:48+00:00
Yep: "The tower itself isn’t just a gimmick; it’s a physical presence that creates tension and anticipation the moment it hits the table. Add the Dark Horde expansion and suddenly the game isn’t just something you play—it’s something you engage with." 100% in Pangram, BTW.

But there's enough biographical details and concrete facts that I think he at least wrote the outline before having ChatGPT rewrite it.
by KevinChasse | 2026-02-16 06:58:10+00:00
I built Whispered, a web experiment in ephemeral, user-driven posts. Every post is born with 120 seconds to live, and the community decides what survives: upvotes add 60 seconds, downvotes subtract 15. No post can live longer than 5 minutes.
The idea is to explore attention, judgment, and fleeting content in a simple, dynamic way. Minimal UI — just posts, timers, and a constantly evolving feed.
I’d love feedback on the mechanics, engagement, and whether the Death Clock creates compelling tension.
by rkuodys | 2026-02-16 06:58:37+00:00
Isnt that point kind of the counterpoint to the AI-first narrative.
With standard, human driven operations its true about opportunity costs. What we are told is that AI will replace human, essentially saying that opportunity cost becomes cash only. Then the question of why doesnt AI lab start SaaS fully managed by AI becomes ever more interesting. Maybe because it's not that simple. Hence, it's not that easy in other companies as well to just replace devs, engineers and so on with AI
by globular-toast | 2026-02-16 06:58:38+00:00
> remembering to shovel the sidewalks is an essential “on the ground” indication that everybody is still doing society.

Are they still doing it?

I had a few "proper winters" in the UK during my early 20s. The roads are gritted (and ploughed if necessary) by local councils in lorries, but the footpaths are supposed to be done by residents. The first proper winter, after the snow had refrozen a few times overnight, the paths were lethal. We have these yellow grit bins scattered everywhere that residents are supposed to use to get grit to do the paths. But nobody was doing it. Anywhere. As a pedestrian you just had to walk in the road. This was a real "society has failed" moment for me.

Not that it matters any more, though. Such winters seem a distant memory. The last I can remember was 2018's "beast from the east", but that was more of a freak event than a normal winter.
by pembrook | 2026-02-16 06:59:58+00:00
Are you arguing against yourself to provide an example of why this law is bad…or do you actually want to force people to eat rotten/spoiled food?

Agriculture has a high environmental and carbon footprint.

Yes, keeping 8 billion humans alive does have non-negligible energy costs. Again I can’t tell if this is sarcasm or if you’re an anti-human environmental terrorist.

If you actually care about agriculture emissions though, population decline will cause this to go down faster than any Eurocrat will with silly laws based on braindead urban monoculture memes.
by jongjong | 2026-02-16 07:00:48+00:00
I was never a big React fan myself. As someone who has used a lot of different JavaScript frameworks over many years, I can say confidently that it's not the best JS framework; especially nowadays due to bloat.

Yet it's better than anything available in any other programming language, on any other platform in existence and that's where it gets is popularity from.

Never bet against JavaScript. People have done this over and over and over again since it was invented. So many haters.

JS was designed to be future-proof and it kept improving over the years; what happened is it improved much faster than people were able to update their emotions about it... These people even preached the JS hate to a whole generation of juniors; some of whom never even experienced JavaScript first-hand.

JavaScript does have some bad parts, as does any other programming language, but the good parts of JS are better than anything else in existence. They keep trying to build abstractions on top (e.g. TypeScript) to try to separate people from JavaScript, but they keep coming back over and over again... And these people will never realize that maybe the reason they keep coming back to JavaScript is because it's pretty darn great. Not perfect, but great nonetheless.
by smileybarry | 2026-02-16 07:03:15+00:00
> You don't have to install executables downloaded from an unknown GitHub account named marler8997. You can download that script and read it just like any other shell script.

You do because the downloaded ZIP contains an EXE, not a readable script, that then downloads the compiler. Even if you skip that thinking "I already have VS set up", the actual build line calls `cl` from a subdirectory.

I'm not going to reconstruct someone's build script. And that's just the basic example of a one file hello world, a real project would call `cl` several times, then `link`, etc.

Just supplying a SLN + VCXPROJ is good enough. The blog post's entire problem is also solved by the .vsconfig[1] file that outlines requirements. Or you can opt for CMake. Both of these alternatives use a build system I can trust over randomgithubproject.exe, along with a text-readable build/project file I can parse myself to verify I can trust it.

1: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/install/impor...
by burnt-resistor | 2026-02-16 07:03:37+00:00
Pecan trees grow best in hot climates. They can tolerate some freezes. In ideal conditions, they produce nuts in 4 years. I'm thinking in colder climates, greenhouse starting in larger containers for longer is basically required. My grandparents had 50' tall pecan trees in zone 8a that dropped about 8-10 lbs. of nuts per tree per year. I'd guess local critters walked off with a fraction small enough to not matter because cleaning up was a semi-nuisance but not as bad as cleaning up olive- and plum-like trees from sidewalks.
by moho | 2026-02-16 07:04:14+00:00
In case the author happens to read these - final statement in native CSS nesting is no longer true.

"The only small difference from Sass: for element selectors you need the & prefix. In Sass you could write a { color: red } inside a parent, but native CSS requires & a { color: red }."

It was true for a bit, but fixed within 2-3 releases iirc. You can now freely nav { a { color: red; } }
by sph | 2026-02-16 07:04:25+00:00
A child-trafficking conspiracy was a total fabrication, meanwhile a major child-trafficking conspiracy was happening under everybody’s noses. What a coincidence, huh?

Seems to me, like all legends, it started on a kernel of truth, then it evolved into something of its own. Not sure why you believe Pizzagate to be totally unrelated to Epstein.
by YaraDori | 2026-02-16 07:05:10+00:00
The most valuable investment in 2026 is turning your daily personal workflow, which usually spread across multiple apps, into a fully automated agentic skill that allows your personal agent to take over on your local computer.

That’s exactly why I built SkillForge so that I can record my screen once and have my everyday work completely automated.

Before, I was struggling to guide OpenClaw to handle cross-software, multi-step, multi-window tasks. It’s extremely hard to write and describe a workflow that is both detailed and flexible at the same time.

This pain point really struck me, and I decided to build the tool myself:

1. Record everything in just one day—all my daily workflows
2. Build SkillForge to convert screen recordings into Agent SKILL .md files
3. Feed them into OpenClaw
4. Boom!!! One shot—and it works!!!

Now my OpenClaw has been running for 5 days straight, following the exact same screen and app interactions from my recording. This “AHA” moment inspired me deeply to share this tool with all my friends and employees for their daily use.

And now, I’d love to share it with our community and make it completely FREE for public good. Welcome to the new era—personalize your agent!

Your future is here: skillforge.expert
by onion2k | 2026-02-16 07:05:26+00:00
There's a balance to strike, and it's hard to get right. You have to give up quality enough that you actually deliver things to users rather than working on 'the perfect code', but you also have to keep quality high enough that you're not slowed down by spaghetti code and tech debt so much that you can't deliver quickly as well.

This is made more complicated by the fact that where the balance lies depends on the people working on the code - some developers can cope with working in a much more of a mess than others. There is no objective 'right way' when you're starting out.

If you have weeks of runway left spending it refactoring code or writing tests is definitely a waste of time, but if you raise your next round or land some new paying customers you'll immediately feel that you made the wrong choices and sacrificed quality where you shouldn't have. This is just a fact of life that everyone has to live with.
by jaccola | 2026-02-16 07:05:35+00:00
All of the latest models I've tried actually pass this test. What I found interesting was all of the success cases were similar to:

e.g. "Drive. Most car washes require the car to be present to wash,..."

Only most?!

They have an inability to have a strong "opinion" probably because their post training, and maybe the internet in general, prefer hedged answers....