MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lock1 | 2026-02-10 19:43:02+00:00
Coming from a more "average imperative" background like C and Java, outside of compiler or serde context, I don't think "parse" is a frequently used term there. The idea of "checking values to see whether they fulfill our expectations or not" is often called "validating" there.

So I believe the "Parse, Don't Validate" catchphrase means nothing, if not confusing, to most developers. "Does it mean this 'parse' operation doesn't 'validate' their input? How do you even perform 'validation' then?" is one of several questions that popped up in my head the first time I read the catchphrase prior to Haskell exposure.

Something like "Utilize your type system" probably makes much more sense for them. Then just show the difference between `ValidatedType validate(RawType)` vs `void RawType::validate() throws ParseError`.
by simonw | 2026-02-10 19:43:03+00:00
Maybe not a lot.

Showboat documents look neater if there are single one-line commands that do something useful. Dumping a full Playwright script into a cell is less readable.

Showboat also has a special feature where you can embed an image directly in the document by running:

showboat image doc.md 'rodney screenshot'

The command you call should return a path to an image file as the last line of output. Rodney does exactly that.

It may well turn out that Rodney is unnecessary and people find better patterns using Showboat with existing tools like playwright-cli - in which case it won't matter because Showboat and Rodney aren't coupled to each other at all.

Showboat is definitely the more significant of the two projects.
by skrtskrt | 2026-02-10 19:44:03+00:00
Yeah I had a manager grill me like crazy about short stints on my resume while I was interviewing for DigitalOcean. He told me it looked like I wasn't dedicated or trustworthy.

He wasn't my manager so I brushed over it and 6 months into working at DO they started 3 rounds of enormous layoffs that were handled so poorly even the executives doing the layoffs got removed by the board.

So I left and got to add another short stint at a company run by craven morons to my resume :)
by program_whiz | 2026-02-10 19:44:11+00:00
Yep, but people can only understand the stresses and challenges they have faced, its very hard to understand something you haven't experienced. Even if you try to imagine it, you really can't understand it until you're living it. But yeah, after kids I think any rational parent would instantly without question abandon or sacrifice a pet for a child. A pet is literally 0 out of 10 compared to a child -- no comparison whatsoever. But I appreciate the "I have a cat" people are at least trying to relate. But its a bit like when my plumber came over and tried to tell me how he's really into programming because he's dabbled in a bit of HTML on his drag and drop website. I was friendly and appreciated relating to it, but he's only grazed the surface. I'm sure in his circles he's the "computer wiz".
by OkayPhysicist | 2026-02-10 19:44:17+00:00
It's not "a distraction". It's serving their constituents. No good people support the Republicans, their primary voter base are just a bunch of hopped-up xenophobes who hate people who aren't like them because they've never met anybody who isn't from their inbred town.

If anything, from a democracy angle it's almost admirable how committed to answering the demands of their base the Right is in America. Pedophile billionaires get their desires met, racist yokels from flyover states get their dreams delivered, the war hawks, all of them.

We need to stop deluding ourselves into thinking "oh, the constituency on the right would be horrified if they just knew better". They wouldn't be them if they knew better. They are simply worse people, and the actions of the government are directly appealing to their worst desires.
by api | 2026-02-10 19:45:23+00:00
Not really. Marx didn't know anything about game theory. But he did come up with some adjacent ideas.

> the Soviet Union proved otherwise. It brought many millions of people out of poverty but also had to make some hard and maybe sometimes wrong choices.

I think that's giving the USSR way too much credit. Had they had, say, a more boring democratic revolution and joined social democratic Europe they'd have done a whole lot better.
Show HN: Air-gapped device to stop deepfake wire fraud
by reutinger | 2026-02-10 19:45:30+00:00
i build air-gapped hardware that verifies wire transfers before they hit the banking rail.

Microsoft's VALL-E 2 clones any voice from 3 seconds of audio. someone deepfakes your CFO on a video call, authorizes a $50M wire, the bank sends it. Arup lost $25.6M this way in February 2024. the phone callback is dead.

detection is a losing arms race. so: physics.

credit-card-sized device. no wifi, no bluetooth, no data ports. displays transaction details on a screen hardwired to the chip. the CFO reads the destination, the amount, the sender. physically confirms. authorization is cryptographically signed on an NXP EdgeLock SE051 (EAL 6+, same chip in banking cards and government passports). signing kernel is ~200 lines of code.

you can clone a voice. you can clone a face. you cannot clone a physical device on someone's desk.

flew to Davos to demo it during the World Economic Forum. swiss counter-terrorism detained me for 13 hours because the prototype looked like an IED. line-by-line code review, cleared the device in under 20 minutes. the 13 hours was bureaucracy, not the code.

since davos: first meetings with J.P. Morgan, BBVA, and UBS.

happy to answer technical questions.

Links:

- Semafor wrote it up: https://www.semafor.com/article/01/22/2026/an-entrepreneurs-...

- original thread (103K views): https://x.com/s_heyneman/status/2014519007244656652

- deepfaked myself authorizing a $60,000 wire for the YC demo. one photo, one voice sample, off-the-shelf AI, 20 minutes: https://x.com/s_heyneman/status/2021100304436191630
Show HN: Opsmeter–attribute LLM spend to endpoints and prompt versions(no proxy)
by opsmeter | 2026-02-10 19:45:33+00:00
Hi HN — I built Opsmeter, a lightweight LLM telemetry tool focused on cost attribution + budget control.

Provider dashboards mostly show totals. Opsmeter shows what caused the bill by breaking spend down by endpointTag, promptVersion, and optionally userId — plus latency and success/error rates.

It’s no-proxy: Opsmeter doesn’t sit in your request path. After each LLM call, you send a small telemetry payload to /v1/ingest/llm-request (provider, model, endpointTag, promptVersion, token counts, latency, status). Opsmeter normalizes cost via a provider/model pricing table and surfaces trends + regressions.

Links:

Home: https://opsmeter.io

Docs: https://opsmeter.io/docs

Pricing: https://opsmeter.io/pricing

If you try it and share anonymized screenshots/feedback, I’m happy to help you interpret the results — e.g.

which endpoints drive spend

which prompt versions increased tokens/cost (deploy regressions)

which users (optional) are the biggest cost drivers

suggested budget thresholds (80% warning / 100% exceeded) and alerting setup

Feedback welcome — especially on what you’d want next: staying telemetry-first, and potentially adding an optional gateway mode later.
Ask HN: Why is everyone here so AI-hyped?
by fandorin | 2026-02-10 19:45:34+00:00
I get it - LLMs do have some value, but not as much as everyone (especially those from AI labs) is trying to pitch. I can't help thinking that it's so obvious we are almost at the very top of this bubble - but here it feels like the majority of HN doesn't think like that...

Yet just in 2026 we had:

- AI.com was sold for $70M - Crypto.com founder bought it to launch yet another "personal AI agent" platform, which promptly crashed during its Super Bowl ad debut.

- MoltBook-mania - a Reddit clone where AI bots talk to each other, flooded with crypto scams and "AI consciousness" posts. 250,000+ bot posts burning compute for what actual value? [0]

- OpenClaw - a "super open-source AI agent" that is a security nightmare.

- GPT-5.3-Codex and Opus 2.6 were released. Reviewers note they're struggling to find tasks the previous versions couldn't handle. The improvements are incremental at best.

I understand there are legitimate use cases for LLMs, but the hype-to-utility ratio seems completely out of whack.

Am I not seeing something?

[0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/02/06/1132448/moltbook-was-peak-ai-theater/
by yamigopal | 2026-02-10 19:45:42+00:00
Author here. We've been building agent trust infrastructure for ~1 year.

We started by implementing the CSA's "Agentic Trust Framework" (ATF), but realized that "Behavioral Monitoring" wasn't enough for autonomous agents—we needed cryptographic Proof of Execution.

So we built VERA (Verifiable Enforcement for Runtime Agents).

It's a reference architecture with 5 hardened pillars:
1. Identity (DID:web + VCs)
2. Proof of Execution (Ed25519 signatures anchored to Solana)
3. Data Sovereignty (Sub-20ms ONNX firewall at the edge)
4. Segmentation (Policy-as-code)
5. Containment (Circuit breakers)

Everything is MIT. You can clone the repo and run `npm test` — 25 contract validation tests.

Repo: https://github.com/berlinailabs/vera-reference-implementatio...
Whitepaper: https://berlinailabs.de/vera-paper.html
Interactive demo: https://berlinailabs.de/vera-demo.html

Happy to answer architecture questions.
by nickpadge | 2026-02-10 19:45:49+00:00
I’m also curious to hear what challenges you encountered. I’ve used LanceDB for a few projects in production now and it’s worked out reasonably well.

The docs quality is spotty, and the lack of parity between the async and sync python API is frustrating, but otherwise it’s been great.

The only performance issues I’ve had have been A) not rebuilding indexes on an appropriate cadence, B) not filtering the search space enough for queries which bypass the index, or C) running search against millions of vectors on an object storage and expecting millisecond latency.
by bmacho | 2026-02-10 19:46:17+00:00
In my view nonnegative numbers have good physical representations: amount, size, distance, position. Even negative integers don't have this types of models for them. Negative numbers arise mostly as a tool for accounting, position on a directed axis, things that cancel out each other (charge). But in each case it is the structure of <R,+> and not <R,+,*> and the positive and negative values are just a convention. Money could be negative, and debt could be positive, everything would be the same. Same for electrons and protons.

So in our everyday reality I think -1 and i exist the same way. I also think that complex numbers are fundamental/central in math, and in our world. They just have so many properties and connections to everything.
by cthalupa | 2026-02-10 19:46:55+00:00
I'll note that calling it the gray market really is people uncomfortable with the idea of buying drugs from a drug dealer trying to find a way to make this more palatable.

That's not a judgment thing on my part - I've got a freezer full of Chinese peptides, among other things.

But the raw API on all of this stuff is coming from China in a way that is effectively unregulated and with no recourse if anything goes wrong. Underground Chinese labs get raided and shut down (usually because they're also involved in producing AAS or opioid precursors) often leaving millions of dollars in unfulfilled product. People get peptides with 0 active ingredient. People get peptides contaminated with disinfectant and have adverse reactions. People get mislabeled peptides. People get radically underdosed or overdoses peptides. And when a controversy hits, these labs close up shop one day and come back a week later under a new name. If you get a vial full of something truly harmful to you and you die, your loved ones have zero recourse.

Your local weed dealer has infinitely more accountability than these labs.

Testing isn't a panacea - people do endotoxin, heavy metal, HPLC, etc., but GCMS and similar basically never happens - and without knowing what the potential substances are the automatching to peaks even for GCMS is often inaccurate to the point of uselessness."Purity" reports on HPLC don't measure everything in the vial - just how pure the targeted peak is. It'll catch protein depredations, but it wouldn't tell you if there was a bunch of anthrax in the vial.

For me, the calculus still makes sense. I've got access to things that have worked incredibly well for me that are not yet available in the US, or in some cases, not likely to ever be. But the "gray" market is buying from overseas drug dealers that don't particularly give a fuck about you. They don't want to hurt you - you spend less money if they do - but they also aren't going out of their way to look after you. Most of them only started HPLC tests because the bodybuilding community demanded it, and these guys were selling AAS and HGH to them before they got into the GLP-1s, and then it became the standard.

These aren't parallel import goods getting sold in areas where they aren't supposed to or unauthorized retailers. These are drug dealers that get shut down by the Chinese government on a regular basis. Go look up QSC, SSA, SRY - and those are just some of the biggest names from the past year or so.
by lapcat | 2026-02-10 19:47:13+00:00
> it’s a bit incendiary

> I also think it overstates the case

I think it's a mistake to defend and/or "reinterpret" the hype, which is not helping to promote the technology to people who aren't bandwagoners. If anything, it drives them away. It's a red flag.

I wish you would just say to the previous commenter, hey, you appear to be exaggerating, and that's not a good idea.
by mellosouls | 2026-02-10 19:47:15+00:00
I'm a cyclist, pedestrian and car driver - I hate the echo chamber approach.

I'm sure there is a lot positive to be said for his work; unfortunately he - like many (most?) on each side in the cyclists vs cars vs pedestrians debate - is as much an idealogue as anybody, often unwilling to acknowledge the excesses and poor behaviour of cyclists - leaving him untrustworthy as a good faith participant, while allowing his video evidence as useful in more balanced hands.
by lelanthran | 2026-02-10 19:47:17+00:00
> The difference is that the first camp is re-experiencing that feeling of wonder while the second camp is lamenting it.

I don't think so. I think the first camp does not get paid for programming, while the second camp does.

That's why the first camp is so happy, and why the second camp is not.

> I thankfully fall in the first camp. AI is allowing me to build things I couldn't, not due to a lack of skills, but a lack of time.

It sounds like you're developing for yourself only. Your attitude makes sense, then - you want a $FOO, and now you can have one without paying for it.

I think you can only empathise with the second camp if your ability to eat depends on being able to sell $FOOs.
by xmprt | 2026-02-10 19:47:50+00:00
Then wouldn't open source models running on commodity hardware be the best way to get around that? I think one of the greatest wins of the 21st century is that almost every human today has more computing power than the entire US government in the 1950s. More computer power has democratized access and ability to disperse information. There are tons of downsides to that which we're dealing with but on the net, I think it's positive.
by dutchCourage | 2026-02-10 19:48:11+00:00
I think the people who like shipping quickly probably don't like building products in the first place and are looking for other aspects of entrepreneurship.

A huge benefit I find in AI is that it helps with a lot of things I hated. Merge conflicts, config files, breaking dependency updates... That leaves me more time to focus on the actual functionalities so I end up with better APIs, more detailed UIs, and more thorough tests. I do think it's possible to be relevant/competitive by only delegating parts of the work to AI and not the whole thing. Though it might change if AI gets too good.
Show HN: Orcbot – an open-source autonomous agent framework
by abilafredkb | 2026-02-10 19:48:33+00:00
Hi
I’m building Orcbot, an open-source AI agent focused on autonomy over chat.

The goal is not “another chatbot”, but an agent that can:

decompose goals

plan actions

use tools

reflect on failures

and improve its behavior over time

Think long-running agents, not prompt → response.

What Orcbot does today

Plugin-based architecture (skills are first-class)

CLI + messaging integrations (Telegram / WhatsApp)

Autonomous execution loops

Error recovery & retry logic

TypeScript / Node.js, MIT licensed

Repo:
https://github.com/fredabila/orcbot

Why I’m posting

The project has reached the point where architecture decisions matter more than code volume, and I’d love feedback and contributors who care about:

agent planning & orchestration

memory systems (episodic / vector)

tool-using agents

self-correction and evaluation loops

multi-agent coordination

I’m especially interested in people who’ve built:

production bots

autonomous systems

developer tools

or have opinions on how agents should fail and recover

What I’m explicitly not claiming

This is not AGI

This is not magic

This is an evolving experiment in practical autonomy

How to get involved

Technical feedback in this thread is very welcome

Issues and PRs on GitHub

If you’re curious but unsure where to start, open a discussion — I’m happy to guide

I’m posting this mainly to learn from the HN community and see where this direction breaks or shines.

Thanks for reading.
by joofbro | 2026-02-10 19:48:43+00:00
trump is disliked by the majority of Americans, and his actions antagonizing Europe are disliked even by most republicans. this is an obvious fact accessible to anyone who reads the news. he will only be around for 2 more years and will be effectively a lame duck after republicans get crushed in the midterms, starting 2027.

all of this infrastructure Europe claims to want to build will take many many years to realize, particularly at the relaxed European pace. trump will be out of office by the time the EU has held it's fifteenth planning meeting to issue it's first strongly worded letter of intent.
by miladyincontrol | 2026-02-10 19:48:45+00:00
For all people talk negatively about friction, honestly I see it in many cases as a feature, not a flaw.

Far too many flaws of discord, reddit, and other "socialmedia commons" come from an absolute lack of friction. People seeing it as almost a right to participate wherever, whenever, without ever lurking more and learning a community's culture, norms, or etiquette.
by KaiserPro | 2026-02-10 19:49:10+00:00
You're mixing debit and credit cards.

In the EU, debit cards are pretty common, and largely its a network effect. You need to get terminals that are supported by your payment provider.

A lot of merchant terminals are provided by banks, and frankly they are itching to get a sweet sweet cut of each transaction. Not only the information, but the cut of each transaction. Something like 0.2-1.5% of each transaction. (I'm sure mastercard and visa give them a cut)

For Credit cards, the banks/operator already handle most of the risk, and then pay visa a percentage for the privilege of charging usury like rates
by Johanx64 | 2026-02-10 19:49:22+00:00
> Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them.

Parents have never truly cared whether or not their children will have "good lives", certainly not in any - "i'll sit down and analyze carefully if my offspring will have a good time" type of way.

Child mortality rate used to be something like 50% in past.

People still have insane fertility rates in complete - objectively shitholes - like Bangladesh, etc.

That's simply not how the world works, that's not how natural selection works.

The problem is that you (and most people frankly) look at the "fertility problem" within their very limited 1-human lifespan. However, if you zoom out a bit, the fertility problem disappears, not only does it disappear completely - the problem will disappear regardless if circumstances get better or if they get way worse.

The mothers (and fathers) that don't have children because they think the "world as it is right now is a bad place", will simply get selected out.

Caring about whether your children will have "a good life" to a point of not having any is simply maladaptive from natural selection POV and it will sort it out very quickly. It's just a 1-gen outlier.
by cthalupa | 2026-02-10 19:49:23+00:00
These studies have conflict of interest, funding, etc. disclosures.

If it was Lilly and Novo pushing these, they'd either show up in those disclosures or you're suggesting a massive conspiracy to undermine the medical regulatory system to sell more drugs that they already have struggled to meet demand for for extended periods of time.

Why would they kill a golden goose that shows no signs of stopping it's egg laying?
by cess11 | 2026-02-10 19:49:25+00:00
Seems they install a Git hook or something that executes on commit and saves your chatbot logs associated with the commit hash. This is expected to somehow improve on the issue that people are synthesising much more code than they could read and understand, and make it easier to pass along a bigger context next time you query your chatbots, supposedly to stop them from repeating "mistakes" that have already wasted your time.
by lII1lIlI11ll | 2026-02-10 19:49:30+00:00
> Should it be legal to tweet a sieg heiling dog in Germany, when it's your dog, and you taught it to sieg heil, and you filmed it at Auschwitz? Or what's the exact boundary between acceptable and unacceptable?

Yes? Yes, of course? Being an idiot on internet has traditionally been legal in civilized liberal western countries. Such person could be banned by a platform that doesn't want such content and ostracized by their peers (they guy who made sieg heiling dog video claimed he did it for his girlfriend or something and I would dump him, if I was her) but I don't want my government to build a panopticon to prevent such behavior and I don't want my taxes wasted on policing it.
by LorenPechtel | 2026-02-10 19:49:39+00:00
Yup, far too much pressure to use cutting off financial access to harm businesses that are disliked by those in power but are not doing anything evil.

I can see a reason they might be skittish, though: Ashley Madison. Note what she's doing: ENM speed dating. I very much doubt she's in a position to actually verify the E part.
by dh2022 | 2026-02-10 19:49:50+00:00
$30 / hr + federal payroll taxes is 5,700 / month ($30 / hr x 40 hrs/week x 4.33 weeks in month x 1.1 for federal payroll taxes). Who has this kind of money on top of mortgage, car payments, food, utilities, etc...? In my circle of friends only one family affords this (the dad is a Director at Meta)
by sieep | 2026-02-10 19:49:51+00:00
Thats sound advice. But why that on the title? Just curious if youd elaborate. I feel like if they are asking of me to do code review, SQL, etc. then my title should align with the rest of the market, especially after a year + multiple years BI experience. Feels like its easy for you to say that about my title when you're not in my shoes (and presumably haven't been called a junior dev for awhile now).