MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dsign | 2026-02-19 18:37:53+00:00
Indeed. In fact, I would go further and say than, more than saving money, one should make preparations for a dignified passing should one's time come early. Living happy, dying before a gruesome disease completely erases that treasure. And, if destiny has it that one gets old enough, and one does so with little more than a camping tent, leaving this world because the night was too cold and one succumbed to hypothermia beats what most people get at the end.
by ted_dunning | 2026-02-19 18:37:59+00:00
That is bizarre and amazing. I have never seen any kind of aircraft that resembled a dragonfly as much as that.

The maneuvers are so extreme and come so fast that I would not have been able to say for certain that this wasn't just a very nasty crash in progress. But they were, in fact, completely controlled and intentional.

Incredible.
by hnlmorg | 2026-02-19 18:38:02+00:00
I’ve been bashing my head against the wall with AI this week because they’ve utterly failed to even get close to solving my novel problems.

And that’s when it dawned on me just how much of AI hype has been around boring, seen-many-times-before, technologies.

This, for me, has been the biggest real problem with AI. It’s become so easy to churn out run-of-the-mill software that I just cannot filter any signal from all the noise of generic side-projects that clearly won’t be around in 6 months time.

Our attention is finite. Yet everyone seems to think their dull project is uniquely more interesting than the next persons dull project. Even though those authors spent next to zero effort themselves in creating it.

It’s so dumb.
by Kaliboy | 2026-02-19 18:38:56+00:00
This is a similar concept to Faktory, which uses a built in Redis server to manage shared job state.

You then implement workers in your language of choice and subscribe to queues.

Very interesting though, the article mentioned a few things I hadn't considered before like shared access to one database from multiple (different) apps.

I wonder how database schema state is handled in a case like that. And CI/CD.
by solarisos | 2026-02-19 18:39:09+00:00
This resonates with what I’m seeing in B2B outreach right now. AI has lowered the cost of production so much that 'polished' has become a synonym for 'generic.' We’ve reached a point where a slightly messy, hand-written note has more value than a perfectly structured AI essay because the messiness is the only remaining signal of actual human effort.
by rglullis | 2026-02-19 18:39:25+00:00
> but the pricing is different because the price of claude.ai and Claude Code includes the API charges they incur.

If that was true, then getting equivalent usage of the API without claude.ai and Claude Code should cost less, not more.

You can try to find all sorts of explanations for it, at the end of the day is quite simple: they are subsidizing one product in order to grow the market share, and they are doing it at a loss now, because they believe they will make up for it later. I understand the reasoning from a business point of view, but this doesn't mean they are entitled to their profits. I do not understand people that think we simply accept their premise and assume they can screw us over just because they asked and put it on a piece of paper.
by alt227 | 2026-02-19 18:39:27+00:00
Yeah, I wonder how fast Chicxulub affected the earth when the majority of large dinosaurs were wiped out.

The earth survived and evolved another set of new large animal masters.
The beauty and diversity of nature we see around us has all evolved after several extinction level events which have all very rapidly killed ecosystems and changed the earths climate.

It will do the same again after all humans are gone. This is the outcome I am hoping comes sooner rather than later.
by numpad0 | 2026-02-19 18:39:30+00:00
Personally, I don't bother prompting LLMs in Japanese, AT ALL, since I'm functional enough in English(a low bar apparent from my comment history) and because they behave a lot stupider otherwise. The Japanese language is always the extreme example for everything, but yes, it would be believable to me if merely normalizing input by first translating just worked.

What would be interesting then would be to find out what the composite function of translator + executor LLMs would look like. These behaviors makes me wonder, maybe modern transformer LLMs are actually ELMs, English Language Models. Because otherwise there'll be, like, dozens of functional 100% pure French trained LLMs, and there aren't.
by vlovich123 | 2026-02-19 18:39:32+00:00
The majority of security vulnerabilities in languages like C that aren’t memory safe are due to memory safety issues like UAF, buffer overflows etc etc. I don’t think I’ve seen finer grained research that tries to break it out by class of memory safety issue. The data is something like 80% of reported vulnerabilities in code written in these languages are due to memory safety issues. This doesn’t mean there aren’t other issues. It just means that it’s the cheapest exploit to search for when you are trying to break into a C/C++ service.

And in terms of how easy it is to convert a memory safety issue into an exploit, it’s not meaningfully much harder. The harder pieces are when sandboxing comes into play so that for example exploiting V8 doesn’t give you arbitrary broader access if the compromised process is itself sandboxed.
by palmotea | 2026-02-19 18:39:57+00:00
> Should we abolish tractors and mechanical looms on the basis that they put farmers and weavers out of work, and only concentrate "money and power" to the "capitalist class"?

If you don't have good jobs (or some equivalent) ready for all the farm workers, sure. Progress should serve everyone, rather than have the costs concentrated on those less able to bear them.

And you need an actual plan, not just a fallacious hand-wave of, "it'll all work this time, because it worked out in the past." You can't assume history will repeat itself (and you may not even want that: a genocide feels far different to those killed than the survivors, and an economic disruption feels far different to those harmed by it than some kid reading about it 100 years later).

But if you can't come up with that, I wouldn't mind some law that forbids businesses from owning and operating AI, reserving that exclusively for workers and worker-organizations.

At some point, automation will mean there won't be any jobs left (at least for most people, and don't hand-wave that away), and AI means we're far closer to that point than we ever have been. Something different will need to happen (though it'll probably a loosening of morals around the value of human life, with billionaire killing off the excess population (us) their kingdoms with vibecoded AI attack drones).
by znnajdla | 2026-02-19 18:40:08+00:00
Even if I was building one single agent for a one off hobby project I would still use Elixir. It’s elegantly suited to the job. With any long running failure prone process you’re constantly writing try/catches, health checks, network timeouts, retries, and a whole lot of other orchestration stuff just to keep a flaky real world agent running. With Erlang it’s all just a built in state machine. The process knows what state it is in, crashes, recovers gracefully in exactly the right state.
by ifwinterco | 2026-02-19 18:40:53+00:00
I think that's more of a financial grift in a lot of cases (how many pie-eyed AI evangelists turn out to be running some "AI startup" or otherwise have skin in the game).

The rust thing is more like actual religious evangelism, like having Jehovah's Witnesses knocking on the door. They have seen the light and you haven't
by thisislife2 | 2026-02-19 18:41:30+00:00
The British were shocked when the 1857 rebellion sought to restore the last Mughal emperor. It was then they decided to resort to a revisionist history of the Mughal rule in India, to deliberately create animosity in the Hindus and Muslims (which is still lapped up by the right-). By further careful grooming of select right-wing Hindus and right-wing muslims leaders in India, the British were successful in preventing the Indians from politically uniting against the British Raj (divide and rule policy) and managed to extend their rule over us for nearly a century more, and in partitioning the country when they left.

Mughal emperors in India were for the most part, secular, and they nurtured an egalitarian society (without disturbing the discriminatory Hindu caste structure so as to not intrude on Hindu religious beliefs) who used India's wealth to empower its growth and made it one of the richest empires in the world (during its time). Art, music and culture was especially patronised by them. Of course, they weren't perfect. Their "brutality" (during war or when suppressing a rebellion) was at par to any empire or kingdom of their time, in India or abroad. For example, Shivaji's (a Hindu ruler revered by the Hindu-right) army used to ransack Hindu temples too (which was again something common for its time in India, and not unique to Islamic invaders) in the Mysore kingdom that then had a Muslim ruler (Tipu Sultan - a ruler who, like his father, incidentally also served as an inspiration for the American revolutionaries in their fight again the British - https://scroll.in/global/970265/how-tipu-sultan-and-haidar-a...). Islamic style raids (amongst other tactics) which Shivaji was famous for, was something he learnt from a Deccan muslim ruler (who was an African slave who rose to become a king in India - https://indianexpress.com/article/research/malik-ambar-auran... !).
by guywithahat | 2026-02-19 18:42:04+00:00
I think the point of the article is that on sites like HN, people used to need domain expertise to answer questions. Their answer was based on unique experience, and even if maybe it wasn't optimal it was unique. Now a lot of people just check chatgpt and answer the question without actually knowing what they're talking about. Worse the bar to submit something to Show HN has gotten lower, and people are vibe coding projects in an afternoon nobody wants or cares about. I don't think the article is really about writing style
by sosodev | 2026-02-19 18:42:04+00:00
Have you tried Qwen3 Coder Next? I've been testing it with OpenCode and it seems to work fairly well with the harness. It occasionally calls tools improperly but with Qwen's suggested temperature=1 it doesn't seem to get stuck. It also spends a reasonable amount of time trying to do work.

I had tried Nemotron 3 Nano with OpenCode and while it kinda worked its tool use was seriously lacking because it just leans on the shell tool for most things. For example, instead of using a tool to edit a file it would just use the shell tool and run sed on it.

That's the primary issue I've noticed with the agentic open weight models in my limited testing. They just seem hesitant to call tools that they don't recognize unless explicitly instructed to do so.
Show HN: Prompt inject AI agents to avoid slop
by eljojo | 2026-02-19 18:42:16+00:00
like many open source repos, mine are also getting spammed with AI slop.

my attempt at this is to "prompt inject" the spammy agents into refusing to do the bare minimum, and try enforce contribution guidelines as much as possible.

How it works:

- AGENTS.md will trigger bots to read contribution guidelines

- Contribution guidelines define slop

- if the PR is too slopy, it will be rejected

- the bot is made aware of this, so it can refuse to work or at the very least inform the user

- PR template now has checkboxes as attestation of following guidelines

anyone care to review my PR? other examples of projects doing this?
by mothballed | 2026-02-19 18:42:23+00:00
600k once in 40 years is cheap compared to the total cost of insurance, especially when you consider the compound interest you could have made on premiums not paid, plus with the freedom to get cancer care cheaper someplace privately outside the US.

Your insurance company got the last laugh by a long shot. A typical family on insurance would pay $600,000 (between their take-home and the reduced wages paid by employers to cover insurance) in just 25 years, and that's before considering the opportunity cost of lost investments/yield.
by fredrussias | 2026-02-19 18:42:24+00:00
Quick follow-up with demo gif + details:

Demo GIF: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fredruss/agent-paperclip/m...
How it works (Claude hooks + Codex session file watching): https://github.com/fredruss/agent-paperclip#how-it-works
Privacy (what it captures / doesn’t): https://github.com/fredruss/agent-paperclip#privacy
by epistasis | 2026-02-19 18:42:51+00:00
One of the bedrocks of a startup economy is that the rule of law applies equally to the powerful and to the less powerful.

We wouldn't have Apple, Netflix, or so many other Bay Area giants without the equal application of law.

I applaud South Korea for pursuing this conviction and achieving a suitable penalty for the breakdown of law at the highest levels. It's quite admirable, as admirable as the UK charging the King's own brother with crimes this morning.

When law breaks down against the powerul, billionaires turn into oligarchs, and all those startups that would have created the next big creative disruption in the economy get squashed, and we all lose out. Inequality of power is a massive risk for any economy.
by jleyank | 2026-02-19 18:43:05+00:00
Reliable ally?? Hell, the US is not a reliable business partner. They've thrown away like 70 years of soft power, alter business or political conditions on a whim and view the whole world as (somewhat?) hostile parties. Business and politics craves stability as that enables medium to long-term planning. The internet was designed to route around damage, and today, the rest of the world is trying to do that vs. the US. It's just not worth the hassle.

The US has demonstrated that "the guardrails" were non-existent. The political system of 200+ years disappeared in a few months or even a few weeks. Currently, the administration claims or demonstrates more personal power than King George did back then when the founding documents were written.
Show HN: Prodlint – A linter that catches what AI coding tools miss
by AMARCOVECCHIO99 | 2026-02-19 18:44:02+00:00
I built Prodlint because I kept shipping the same bugs when building with Cursor, Copilot, and v0. Hardcoded secrets, missing auth checks, hallucinated imports, SQL injection through template literals — AI tools generate these constantly and TypeScript doesn't catch them.

Prodlint is a zero-config static analysis tool with 52 rules across four categories: Security, Reliability, Performance, and AI Quality.
It runs in ~1 second, uses AST parsing (no LLM calls), and scores your codebase 0-100.

Some things it catches that surprised me during development:
- Imports for npm packages that don't exist (AI hallucinates these)
- API methods that aren't real (.flatten(), .contains(), .substr())
- "use client" on files that don't need it
- Prisma writes without $transaction
- Next.js redirect() inside try/catch (breaks silently)
- NEXT_PUBLIC_ on secrets like database URLs

Usage: npx prodlint (no install needed)

Also works as a GitHub Action (posts PR comments with scores) and as an MCP server for Claude Code / Cursor / Windsurf.

MIT licensed. Would love feedback on false positives — that's the hardest part of building a linter
by the_harpia_io | 2026-02-19 18:44:05+00:00
mostly for the boring stuff - layout scaffolding, new component boilerplate, converting figma specs. works well enough there.

falls apart with anything stateful or that requires understanding the rest of the codebase. hallucinates imports, ignores how you've actually structured things. spent more time correcting context issues than i saved.

the part that bugs me more is the output looks clean but has subtle problems. it'll reach for innerHTML where it shouldn't, handle user input in ways that aren't production-safe. easy to miss in review when you're moving fast and the code looks confident
by Legend2440 | 2026-02-19 18:44:07+00:00
That said, random or exhaustive search is a more scientifically useful method than you might think.

The first commercial antibiotics (Sulfa drugs) were found by systemically testing thousands of random chemicals on infected mice. This was a major drug discovery method up until the 1970s or so, when they had covered most of the search space of biologically-active small molecules.
by jrmg | 2026-02-19 18:44:26+00:00
The issue with the recent rise in Show HN submissions, from the perspective of someone on the ‘being shown’ side, is that they are from many different perspectives lower quality than they used to be.

They’re solving small problems or problems that don’t really exist, usually in naive ways. The things being shown are ‘shallow’. And it’s patently obvious that the people behind them will likely not support them in any meaning full way as time goes on.

The rise of Vibe Coding is definitely a ‘cause’ of this, but there’s also a social thing going on - the ‘bar’ for what a Show HN ‘is’ is lower, even if they’re mostly still meeting the letter of the guidelines.
by Bender | 2026-02-19 18:44:37+00:00
The problem appears to be the domain itself [1] as most submissions are auto [dead] as of 2018. Enable showdead in your profile to see them.

In those cases all one can do is email Daniel dang hn@ycombinator.com or avoid submitting that domain. It is possible that you may never see a response as he gets buried in requests to remove auto-dead for many domains.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=invidelabs.com
by vladms | 2026-02-19 18:44:38+00:00
I was talking mostly about Americans I met. What might be true though is that probably I met the well off ones and between 30 and 40, which might like the idea of "we are great because we made it". But they all seemed (to me) that they were extremely focused on work (like: no particular hobbies, no knowledge of fields outside their work).

Some of my impression seems to be confirmed by data, for example (did not check in detail but I have seen similar ideas): "Even so, the average 40-hour-per-week employee in the U.S. is working 400 more hours annually — the equivalent of 10 more weeks — than employees in Germany." https://money.com/americans-work-hours-vs-europe-china/
by gavinray | 2026-02-19 18:44:49+00:00
> "We find that agents who choose new experiments at random develop the most informative and predictive theories of the world. "

There's a neat book about this: "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned (The Myth of the Objective")

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25670869-why-greatness-c...

Incidentally, the author works at OpenAI these days.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Stanley
by enobrev | 2026-02-19 18:44:51+00:00
I feel like dealing with robo-calls for the past couple years had led me to this conclusion a bit before this boom in ai-generated text. When I answer my phone, if I hear a recording or a bot of some sorts, I hang up immediately with the thought "if it were important, a human would have called". I've adjusted this slightly for my kid's school's automated notifications, but otherwise, I don't have the time to listen to robots.
by reconnecting | 2026-02-19 18:45:07+00:00
Recently I asked Claude to build a communication tool and TUI was its first proposal. When I had a similar request with ChatGPT previously, it proposed node.js, I assume because there are more examples in its training data.

The pairing of Claude and TUI doesn't seem like a coincidence to me, perhaps there are fewer moving parts that are easy to coordinate?
by buttered_toast | 2026-02-19 18:45:40+00:00
I think we need to reevaluate what purpose these sorts of questions serve and why they're important in regards to judging intelligence.

The model getting it correct or not at any given instance isn't the point, the point is if the model ever gets it wrong we can still assume that it still has some semblance of stochasticity in its output, given that a model is essentially static once it is released.

Additionally, hey don't learn post training (except for in context which I think counts as learning to some degree albeit transient), if hypothetically it answers incorrectly 1 in 50 attempts, and I explain in that 1 failed attempt why it is wrong, it will still be a 1-50 chance it gets it wrong in a new instance.

This differs from humans, say for example I give an average person the "what do you put in a toaster" trick and they fall for it, I can be pretty confident that if I try that trick again 10 years later they will probably not fall for it, you can't really say that for a given model.
by matheus-rr | 2026-02-19 18:45:48+00:00
The missing dimension here is how agents handle environmental drift. Session duration tells you an agent can work for 45 minutes on a static task, but real production environments aren't static — APIs deprecate endpoints, libraries release breaking changes, infrastructure configs shift between runs.

The practical measure of autonomy isn't how long an agent can work uninterrupted. It's whether it can detect that something in its environment changed since the last run and adapt accordingly, rather than silently producing wrong output.

An agent that completes a 45-minute coding session but doesn't notice it's targeting a deprecated API endpoint is less autonomous than one that stops after 10 minutes and flags the incompatibility. saezbaldo's point about authorization scope matters, but so does awareness of environmental state — both are things session duration completely misses.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2026-02-19 18:46:02+00:00
> Avocado. I heard it was dinosaur food.

Nope, and this is trivial to check. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avocado#Taxonomy_and_evolution

The proposed dispersers are now-extinct mammalian megafauna. Much more recent - 10k to 100k years ago.
by nickjj | 2026-02-19 18:46:08+00:00
Look at the world Google is molding.

Here's a guy who has had an online business dependent on ranking well in organic searches for ~20 years and has 2.5 million subs on YouTube.

Traffic to his site was fine to sustain his business this whole time up until about 2-3 years where AI took over search results and stopped ranking his site.

He used Google's AI to rewrite a bunch of his articles to make them more friendly towards what ranks nowadays and he went from being ghosted to being back on the top of the first page of results.

He told his story here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II2QF9JwtLc.

NOTE: I've never seen him in my YouTube feed until the other day but it resonated a lot with me because I have a technical blog for 11 years and was able to sustain an online business for a decade until the last 2 years or so. Traffic to my site nose dived. This translates to a very satisfying lifestyle business to almost $0. I haven't gone down the path of rewriting all of my posts with AI to remove my personality yet.

Search engines want you to remove your personal take on things and write in a very machine oriented / keyword stuffed way.