MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by philipmoses | 2026-02-05 10:05:46+00:00
It’s about the "Per User Tax"

The panic over SaaS vs AI is simpler than people think. For years, we’ve been paying "Enterprise" prices for tools that are essentially just a UI on top of a database.

I'm a solution architect, and we recently looked at the $30/user/mo price tag for legacy test management tools. It’s insane. Why am I paying a "per user per month tax" for a glorified spreadsheet when I can pay $20 for an AI agent that can build me a custom version in a week?

So, we did exactly that. We used Claude and Cursor to "vibe-code" EZTest. A 100% open source, self hosted alternative that does 90% of what the expensive SaaS tools do, but with zero recurring fees and total data ownership.

The market is crashing because the "Application Layer" has been commoditized. If you can build and own your infrastructure for the cost of a few API calls, the era of renting basic software is over.

We aren't just building a tool; we're proving that the "SaaS Tax" is now optional.
by Kim_Bruning | 2026-02-05 10:05:56+00:00
I sympathize with your situation, and I'm not calling you a monster. But "I had no choice, I had people depending on me" is the exact reasoning that has enabled every atrocity carried out by ordinary people; it's the banality of evil.

None of the individual acts seem evil. Conducting a census isn't evil. Collating the data isn't evil. Arresting people with the wrong papers isn't necessarily evil. Driving a train isn't evil. Operating a switch isn't evil. Processing paperwork isn't evil.

Look what's proposed now: Adtech has the data, this would feed into ICE systems leading to arrests, flights are conducted, and people get put into prison camps like CECOT where they have no recourse and where people are already talking about forced labor.

So no, I'm not saying to these folks "you're literally causing Auschwitz". That's a famous Vernichtungslager, and that's not true yet.

But people getting locked up in Concentrationslager or Arbeitslager (like historically : Mittelbau-Dora, Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, and Monowitz). I think we're getting there.

I guess the question is: at which point do you decide maybe to wear extra layers or skip a meal instead? We're not there yet. The chain has many links. Eternal vigilance is needed to make sure they don't actually link up.

(ps. Imagine if I was posting this in 2024! Can I exchange this timeline for another please? )
by disgruntledphd2 | 2026-02-05 10:07:33+00:00
> No, a bakery using Shopify will not spare them having these documents.

https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/privacy-and-security/priv...

Most of the information relates to online marketing, which does tend to come with more GDPR compliance requirements. My wife runs a business through Shopify and the only thing we need to worry about is email addresses.

Can you help me understand what you see as the issues around GDPR compliance here?
Show HN: Pit – Git for LLM prompts (332 tests, 10 features)
by rahulrmk | 2026-02-05 10:07:44+00:00
I built PIT because managing 50+ LLM prompts in Google Docs broke my production AI 3 times.

PIT is "git for prompts" — semantic version control that understands LLM behavior, not just text changes.

Key features:
• Bisect: Binary search to find which prompt version broke
• Replay: Test same input across all versions instantly
• Query: Find versions with "success_rate > 0.9"
• Patches: Share prompt improvements like code reviews
• Hooks: CI/CD for prompts (pre-commit security scans)

332 tests. Production-ready. Open source.

pip install prompt-pit

Would love feedback from anyone managing prompts in production!
by 112233 | 2026-02-05 10:07:53+00:00
Is there a way to make linux kernel schedule in a "batch friendly way"? Say I do "make -j" and get 200 gcc processes diong jobserver LTO link with 2GB RSS each. In my head, optimal way through such mess is get as many processes as can fit into RAM without swapping, run them to completion, and schedule additional processes as resources become available. A depth first, "infinite latency" mode.

Any combination of cgroups, /proc flags and other forbidden knobs to get such behaviour?
by ndsipa_pomu | 2026-02-05 10:09:19+00:00
It's "illegal", but certain places have a semi-permanent funk hanging in the air. It's almost as if it's decriminalised, but I'd expect police to grudgingly act if you're overly blatant when smoking it in the street.

It really should be legalised so that we can earn a bit of tax from its sale and reduce the amount of cash that criminals make from it (not so much the seller to the public, but all the criminal organisations that grow and smuggle it).
by b1temy | 2026-02-05 10:09:46+00:00
> the idea being that the platform is "someone else's computer"

I have a vague memory of once having a userscript or browser extension that replaced every instance of the word "cloud" with "other peoples' computers". (iirc while funny, it was not practical, and I removed it).

fwiw I agree and I do not believe using "the cloud" for everything is a good idea either, I've just never heard of the word "clown" being used in this way before now.
by TheDong | 2026-02-05 10:10:18+00:00
You don't need any auth to send an email from your domain, or in fact from any domain. Just set whatever `From` you want.

I've received many emails from `root@localhost` over the years.

Admittedly, most residential ISPs block all SMTP traffic, and other email servers are likely to drop it or mark it as spam, but there's no strict requirement for auth.
by AIorNot | 2026-02-05 10:10:29+00:00
WTH is this article on about?

I just went to a tech social event last week here in Seattle and there were so may older men and women desperately looking for new positions after having been brutally cut by Microsoft and Amazon

Also the calculus that older employees cost companies more in salary and benefits is usually ruthlessly applied

In the tech / startup world I have to lie about my age or hide it as an over 50 year old..

I mean you don’t see any AI commercials with gray haired people do you

Ageism and Sexism is rampant in tech - not to mention the practice or hiring folks of one age , sex and ethnicity or another as culture ‘fit’

It sucks because so many older tech experts with years of good experience have been thrown by the wayside.. to the point where its a cliche
by cadamsdotcom | 2026-02-05 10:11:05+00:00
The actual constraint is how long people are willing to wait for results.

If the results are expected to be really good, people will wait a seriously long time.

That’s why engineers move on to the next feature as soon as the thing is working - people simply don’t care if it could be faster, as long as it’s not too slow.

It doesn’t matter what’s technically possible- in fact, a computer that works too fast might be viewed as suspicious. Taking a while to give a result is a kind of proof of work.
by adamcharnock | 2026-02-05 10:11:09+00:00
An interesting question, so time for some 100% speculation.

It sounds like they probably have revenue in the €500mm range today. And given that the bare metal cost of AWS-equivalent bills tends to be a 90% reduction, we'll say a €10mm+ bare metal cost.

So I would say a cautious and qualified "yes". But I know even for smaller deployments of tens or hundreds of servers, they'll ask you what the purpose is. If you say something like "blockchain," they're going to say, "Actually, we prefer not to have your business."

I get the strong impression that while they naturally do want business, they also aren't going to take a huge amount of risk on board themselves. Their specialism is optimising on cost, which naturally has to involve avoiding or mitigating risk. I'm sure there'd be business terms to discuss, put it that way.
Show HN: StatCalc – Statistical Calculator with Clear Visualizations
by onyx_writes | 2026-02-05 10:11:32+00:00
I built this to fill the gap between phone calculators and complex software like SPSS. StatCalc handles the statistical calculations that students and researchers need most often:

• Descriptive statistics with histogram visualization
• Confidence intervals (proper t-distribution)
• One-sample t-tests with p-values
• Sample size/power analysis

Clean interface, works on mobile, no installation needed. Built with vanilla JS to keep it fast and simple.

Would love feedback on the UI and what other statistical functions would be most useful to add.
by joaquinbernal | 2026-02-05 10:11:46+00:00
Agreed: Borland was at its peak, and Turbo Pascal or Turbo C/C++ were used all the time. Turbo Vision was the framework under many applications: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision

Also, Clipper was very popular at that time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_(programming_language)
by pseudohadamard | 2026-02-05 10:11:50+00:00
Not necessarily. I've got a sidebar taking up otherwise unused space on this way-too-wide screen that shows memory usage, CPU usage, network traffic, top processes, hardware temps, and a pile of other useful stuff. It's incredibly useful to be able to glance over and see what's going on under the hood if something appears slow, or hung, or other odd things are happening.
by reify | 2026-02-05 10:12:59+00:00
Hey openclaw team:

can you do something about these malicious skills in your registry, Clawhub?

last night the user hightower6eu published more than 200 malicious skills. Each of these tricks the user into installing malware.

ROTFLMAO

malware-skills, claw-scrubber, clawds-shit, molt-n-crook, open-crooked-claw.

All the brain dead fantasy Muppets, jumping on the highway to hell! The road to nowhere.
by srean | 2026-02-05 10:14:04+00:00
Indeed. It's such a beautiful book.

I love Playfair's too.

I used to have a lot of trouble with Euclid's (translated) definition of a straight line, ... What the heck is "lies evenly". Playfair's made it click.

Another point is those Euclidean definitions aren't really formal definitions, but familiarisations. Then it makes more sense.

After Playfairs my understanding of an Euclidean straight line is that it's a function from a pair of points to a set of points (that forms the line) such that if you invoke the same function on any pair of points in its range you get back the same exact set of points (the range of the function). This made it click why a "straight line" in hyperbolic geometry or spherical geometry is still a "straight line".

On a different note, David Berlinski's Tour of Calculus is possibly the most atrocious, verbal diarrheaic book I have ever read. The formula of the book seems to be that every confusing sentence can be righted if every noun is accompanied by 20 florid adjectives and verbs by 59 muddled adverbs and no one will notice that the sentence is nonsense.

For some reason it gets a lot of love among some HN readers. Very few books generate as much revulsion in me than that one.
by lsofzz | 2026-02-05 10:14:14+00:00
Let me make this so simple that a ten year old can do it.
- https://pi-hole.net/ (good enough but not `hardcore`)
- browser ublock plugin/extension

if you want hardcore - segment the VLAN, egress FW, put your stoopid LAN devices on their separate VLANs, cordone off using gateway FW, DPI the packets, nullroute/blackhole DNS the shit out of trackers/analytics
by croon | 2026-02-05 10:14:15+00:00
I think you are fairly unique in audiobook consumption though. I imagine most people (myself included when I do) consume audiobooks where they would have otherwise listened to podcasts or radio, meaning stochastically in the car, doing chores, generally during other activities.

If I were to sit down in my book corner chair, putting on an audiobook and leaning back, I can imagine I'd have the same experience as you, but that is when I would otherwise read a book the traditional way. Perhaps this will change when I get older and wish to rest my eyes and arms while taking in a book.
by grunder_advice | 2026-02-05 10:14:52+00:00
If I've learned something during my early adulthood it's that, it's impossible to not be in conflict with at least some people, because even if you're the most fair and considerate person on the planet, other people will prey on you to try to encroach on your territory and steal what you have.

So the idea that you have nothing to hide is completely banal. Those who are more powerful than you won't leave you alone just because you ignore them. They will eventually come knocking to steal your wealth and your freedom.
by Gibbon1 | 2026-02-05 10:15:32+00:00
That's gold.

That hardware real time clocks keep time in date and time drives me batty. And no one does the right thing which is just a 64 bit counter counting 32khz ticks. Then use canned tested code to convert that to butt scratching monkey time.

Story my old boss designed an STD Bus RTC card in 1978 or something. Kept time in YY:MM:DD HH:MM:SS 1/60 sec. And was battery backed. With shadow registers that latched the time. Couple of years later redesigned it as a 32 bit seconds counter. With a 32khz sub seconds counter. Plus a 48 bit offset register. What was a whole card was now a couple of 4000 series IC's on the processor card. He wrote 400 bytes of Z80 assembly to convert that to date and time. He said was tricky to get right but once done was done.
Test management tools for automation heavy teams
by Divyakurian | 2026-02-05 10:16:16+00:00
We are trying to find a good test management tool for a team that relies a lot on automation and CI.
Curious what people here are actually using in real projects. What worked well and what did not?
Main things we care about:
Easy to use for both dev and QA
Works well with automated tests and CI CD
Good API and automation support
Useful reporting and traceability
Handles large test suites without becoming slow
Reasonable cost for what it offers
Would really like to hear real experiences, including tools you stopped using and why.
by ch_123 | 2026-02-05 10:17:15+00:00
You're implying that people are telling you to set up swap without any reason, when in fact there are good reasons - namely dealing with memory pressure. Maybe you could fit so much RAM into your computer that you never hit pressure - but why would you do that vs allocating a few GB of disk space for swap?

Also, as has been pointed out by another commenter, 8GB of swap for a system with 8GB of physical memory is overkill.
by lelanthran | 2026-02-05 10:18:13+00:00
> Ummm is that plateauing with us in the room?

Well, the capabilities have already plateaued as far as I can tell :-/

Over the next few yeas we can probably wring out some performance improvements, maybe some efficiency improvements.

A lot of the current AI users right now are businesses trying to on-sell AI (code reviewers/code generators, recipe apps, assistant apps, etc), and there's way too many of them in the supply/demand ratio, so you can expect maybe 90% of these companies to disappear in the next few years, taking the demand for capacity with them.
by bcgreenberg | 2026-02-05 10:18:34+00:00
I work in DevRel at Arbitrum. The problem I kept running into: developers want to try Stylus (Rust smart contracts that compile to WASM and run on Arbitrum alongside Solidity), but the getting-started path involves too many disconnected pieces. You need the Rust WASM target, cargo-stylus, Docker for the local devnode, knowledge of the sol_storage! macro for storage layouts, ABI export for the frontend, CORS workarounds for the devnode, and so on. Each piece is documented, but the integration path is not.

So I built a Claude Code skill that encodes the full workflow as structured reference documentation. A "skill" is a set of markdown files that Claude loads into context when relevant. The main SKILL.md file contains a compact decision tree (Stylus vs Solidity vs both), the monorepo structure, bootstrap commands, and core workflow. Six deeper reference docs cover Stylus SDK patterns, Solidity/Foundry specifics, frontend integration (viem + wagmi), local devnode setup, deployment, and testing.

The key design choice is on-demand loading. Claude doesn't load all 6 reference docs at once -- it reads the decision tree and pulls in only the ones the current conversation needs. This keeps context usage efficient while still having deep knowledge available.

The skill is opinionated by design. It prescribes viem (not ethers.js), pnpm (not npm/yarn), Foundry (not Hardhat), specific SDK versions. I found that LLMs produce dramatically more consistent output when you eliminate ambiguous tool choices. The tradeoff is obvious -- if you prefer ethers.js, this skill isn't for you.

What the skill doesn't do: it doesn't generate contracts blindly. It knows about Arbitrum-specific gotchas like block.number returning approximate L1 block numbers, the two-component fee model, Stylus contract activation requirements, and the CORS issue with the devnode. These are the things that trip up developers who copy-paste from Ethereum tutorials.

Tradeoffs I'm aware of: the opinionated approach means this won't suit every workflow. The skill doesn't support Hardhat or ethers.js users. The reference docs will need updating as the Stylus SDK evolves. And it's only useful if you're already using Claude Code.

MIT licensed. The whole thing is markdown files -- easy to fork, modify, or use as a template for skills in other domains.

Demo video: https://youtu.be/vsejiaOTmJA
by logicallee | 2026-02-05 10:19:24+00:00
Curious to see Claude Code code?

Streaming live now (2:10 Pacific, 5:10 EST on Thursday, February 5, 2026), Claude Code is iteratively improving its reference bitnet implementation.[1] It previously successfully ported Bitnet from C++ and Python to its own implementation in Javascript and WASM. (It also ported it to webGPU, however it doesn't work on my computer with my GPU, and it's running on a server without a GPU at the moment, so I'm not sure if it works or not.)

Its implementation diverges from the reference implementation though, even with the same model file, and is qualitatively worse, so now it is iteratively improving its own implementation, until it matches the reference implementation.

This livestream is historically important and significant because Claude Code has been set to code completely autonomously for about ten hours. If you're wondering what it's like to watch Claude Code code in February 2026, this video can give you a good idea. (Most people code with it in an interactive session rather than asking it to work autonomously.)

It will be a very significant and important video in ten years, when we can look back at the State of the Art in 2026.

Here is its working implementation which is its baseline and starting point.[2]

[1] You can read about bitnet here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862005

-----------------------------------------------------

[2] Here is its currently working implementation, along with weights (886 MB):

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:44c94fac8284e3d0a1756baf88a3733c8b412401&dn=torrent&xl=929501645

or

https://wormhole.app/Wqe61N#8E-91909yNPf6bt3atj6Eg
by emsign | 2026-02-05 10:19:37+00:00
LLMs are a very cool and powerful tool when you've learned how to use them effectively. But most people probably didn't and thus use them in a way that they produce unsatisfying results while maximizing resource and token use.

The cause of that is the companies with the big models are actually in the token selling business, marketing their models as all around problem solvers and life improvers.
by lproven | 2026-02-05 10:19:43+00:00
So, not a conspicuously wealthy country, then?

Whereas I lived (and am back, sadly) in an offshore tax haven.

The rich used Macs. Musicians used Macs. They were not some dedicated tool only found in certain places. Entire industries, big important industries, ran on them.

What killed Commodore and Atari was that in the end although they had niches, they didn't conquer whole sectors.

This is why Sinclair Research tried to push into the business market with the QL. Sir Clive knew that the home/games sector was about thin margins and price battles, while in rich America, you could get fat on it, you can't in Europe.

He carved out an early niche as the cheapest home computers that were good enough and were competitive, but it was low-margin/high-unit-count.

The business market will pay for good tools. Bits of it paid extra for Macs for decades because they were good at some things.

That is a viable long-term market: "the best cheap home computer for the money" is not.
by rapsey | 2026-02-05 10:19:49+00:00
> A completely theoretical pro-business political body would remove any and all obstacles to business: environmental regulations, labour protection, taxation, financial oversight, so on and so forth, I believe we can agree that such move would be detrimental to society at large while making businesses extremely rich, right?

This assumes that all obstacles and regulations are to the benefit of the environment and people and that the regulation results in intended consequences.

In modern western countries regulation is very often ideological and actively harms the populace and economy. Case in point Germany and their green and anti nuclear hysteria, which resulted in total reliance on coal.
by geocar | 2026-02-05 10:20:03+00:00
Who are you thinking of?

Netflix might be spending as much as $120m (but probably a little less), and I thought they were probably Amazon's biggest customer. Does someone (single-buyer) spend more than that with AWS?

Hertzner's revenue is somewhere around $400m, so probably a little scary taking on an additional 30% revenue from a single customer, and Netflix's shareholders would probably be worried about risk relying on a vendor that is much smaller than them.

Sometimes if the companies are friendly to the idea, they could form a joint venture or maybe Netflix could just acquire Hertzner (and compete with Amazon?), but I think it unlikely Hertzner could take on Netflix-sized for nontechnical reasons.

However increasing pop capacity by 30% within 6mo is pretty realistic, so I think they'd probably be able to physically service Netflix without changing too much if management could get comfortable with the idea
by mmarian | 2026-02-05 10:21:13+00:00
If I were you, I'd ask...

1. Why hasn't anyone come up with a solution already? It's not something ground-breaking.

2. Which individual person is actually suffering from the problem you're trying to solve? Have you spoken to them? Are they desperate enough to pay for a better solution?

You might discover that businesses are ok with the cost of security breaches, and the existing training is just a tick-box :)
by moh_maya | 2026-02-05 10:21:59+00:00
Was comparing the remarkable with the kindle scribe and the boox note 5c - and settled on the 5c - though the battery life trade-off is significant (I end up charging once every 3-4 days, with 2-3 hours of daily use - writing and reading) - and I am really happy with the device. Fantastic hand-writing feel, very good on-device hand-writing recognition, and decent to very good integration with google drive, notes export, etc. May be worth considering if you are looking for an colour e-ink device that you can write on (notes, thoughts, journalling), as well as run android play store applications, including the kindle app.
Show HN: Blaeckfetch – Minimal system fetch with retro console-style splash mode
by gustafeden | 2026-02-05 10:22:08+00:00
I built blaeckfetch to explore what's possible with terminal rendering. It's a system fetch tool built on top of my terminal UI library (blaeck) — image conversion, 256-color fallback, animation phases, that sort of thing.

It has a retro console-style splash mode with a procedural starfield, or your own background image rendered as half-block terminal characters. I liked how it turned out, maybe you will too.

Runs in ~7ms with boot-cycle caching for static fields like hostname and CPU. Written in Rust.

Not trying to replace fastfetch or anything — just a personal project. Hope someone else finds it useful too.

Try it: `brew tap gustafeden/tap && brew install blaeckfetch` (macOS) or install from source via the repo.

Repo: https://github.com/gustafeden/blaeckfetch
Docs: https://gustafeden.github.io/blaeckfetch/

Happy to answer questions about the implementation.