MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by datsci_est_2015 | 2026-02-08 19:53:41+00:00
I knew someone would respond with this. HN is rampant with this sort of contrarian defeatism, and I just responded the other day to a nearly identical comment on a different topic, so:

No, it is not better. I have spent $AGE years of my life developing the ability to determine whether someone is authentically providing me sympathy, and when they are, I actually appreciate it. When they aren’t, I realize that that person is probably being mistreated by some corporate monstrosity or they’re having a shit day, and I provide them benefit of the doubt.

> At least the computer isn’t being forced to lie to me.

Isn’t it though?

> We need a law that forces management to be regularly exposed to their own customer service.

Yeah we need something. I joke about with my friends creating an AI concierge service that deals with these chatbots and alerts you when a human is finally somehow involved in the chain of communication. What a beautiful world where we’ll be burning absurd amounts of carbon in some sort of antisocial AI arms race to try to maximize shareholder profit.
by lelanthran | 2026-02-08 19:53:49+00:00
> Surely your criteria should be some combination of the two (plus other factors).

Sure, but the weighting would be different for different people.

> C may have fewer footguns than C++, but it still has many, whilst also lacking many useful features

We are not talking "2 fewer footguns", or "5 fewer footguns"; we are talking "dozens fewer footguns".

When I need a language with more features than C, I don't choose C++, because the choice is not "Use C for simplicity, and use C++ to trade simplicity off against features", it's usually "Use C for simplicity, and use Java/C#/Go/Rust for features".
by sfbapt | 2026-02-08 19:53:56+00:00
Been working on this for weeks, finally got it up and running with a chunk of the public transit covered (there's more). This is very much a work in progress and I'll be updating this regularly throughout the day/rest of the week, so it'll likely change.

On that note, please tell me how I can make it better. If you notice some data is outdated/incorrect or have sources for more data, please post them below!
Ask HN: How do you maintain integrations once they're in production?
by ksvmkoundinya | 2026-02-08 19:54:09+00:00
Hi HN — I’m exploring a product idea around integration reliability and would really appreciate feedback.

Many modern products depend on integrations across payments, analytics, messaging, auth, and cloud workflows. Setting these up is usually manageable, but maintaining them as systems evolve often becomes a hidden operational burden.

I’m experimenting with building *VibeInfra*, a platform focused on:

• One-click integration setup
• Automated workflow and business-logic testing
• Continuous monitoring for silent failures
• Ongoing maintenance when APIs, schemas, or workflows change

The motivation came from repeatedly seeing issues like:

• Billing systems and product entitlements drifting out of sync
• Analytics and attribution pipelines degrading over time
• Webhooks or event pipelines failing without immediate visibility
• Customer lifecycle messaging triggering incorrectly
• Different services disagreeing on core business state (orders, subscriptions, users)

The goal is to treat integrations more like infrastructure that needs reliability guarantees rather than one-time connections.

I’m trying to validate a few assumptions:

• Are integrations a recurring maintenance burden for your team?
• What types of integration failures cause the most business impact?
• How do you currently test or monitor integration correctness?
• Would you consider outsourcing integration reliability if it worked well?

I’d really value any thoughts, skepticism, or pointers to existing solutions I should study.
by kccqzy | 2026-02-08 19:54:26+00:00
It’s about abstraction layers. Most of the time, understanding the generated assembler code isn’t useful when it comes to understanding the problem. It satisfies my curiosity sure, but the problem is at the C level, an undefined behavior.

Understanding what the C compiler generates is interesting, but without a corresponding intuition about the optimizer passes, such understanding is shallow and unlikely to be generalized to other problems in the future. You probably won’t even remember this the next time you debug another undefined behavior. On the other hand, if you were to know the optimizer passes employed by the compiler and could deduce this code from that, then it is a useful exercise to enhance your intuition about them.
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-02-08 19:54:41+00:00
Yep, I agree 100%. People have described AI coding as "delegating". But there's a reason I'm an IC and not a manager. It's because I don't want to delegate to someone else who does the work, I want to do the work. There's no joy to be had in having someone else do the work at my behest.

If the future of the technology industry truly is having AI write software for you, then I will do what I have to do. At the end of the day I have to put food on the table. But I will hate every second of my job at that point, and it sucks ass.
Show HN: Sofia Core – Open-source AI infrastructure with biological computing
by emeraldorbit | 2026-02-08 19:54:45+00:00
Hi HN,

We built Sofia Core - open-source AI infrastructure exploring biological computing in production systems.

Technical approach:
• DNA-inspired algorithms for massive parallelism (10^15 operations)
• Swarm intelligence for distributed coordination
• Temporal reasoning for time-aware predictions

Stack: Python/FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Redis
Testing: 70%+ coverage, 100+ endpoints
License: MIT

Research foundation: 8,000-word paper with benchmarks showing 300× speedups in parallel pattern matching tasks.

Quick start:
git clone https://github.com/emeraldorbit/sofia-core-backend
./quick-start.sh

Runs locally in 5 minutes. Graceful fallbacks if you don't have API keys.

Questions for HN:
1. Is biological computing interesting beyond academic research?
2. Would you trust this in production today?
3. What's missing for your use case?

Launching on Product Hunt tomorrow - would love HN's technical feedback first.

Code: https://github.com/emeraldorbit/sofia-core-backend
Paper: [repo]/research/papers/dna-computing/PAPER.md
by mindslight | 2026-02-08 19:54:57+00:00
I own (inherited) guns and live in a rural area, but taking a safety class made me realize I'm simply not the kind of person who will ever want to carry in public - both for the extreme responsibility and also for any conflict being immediately escalated. So I think we're coming from a generally similar nuanced "centrist" background.

But what does "100% responsible for its use" even mean, modulo mens rea? If instead of an Uber courier, this had been someone knowingly working for a local gang, we would be viewing the shooting as a lot more justified, right?

I'd say that the shooter's perception was halfway to this, despite how we can Monday morning quarterback that the shooter should have perceived the human being they were aiming at was cowering and backing away. Human perception is terribly biased towards confirming what we think we should see.

Rather it's the surveillance industry's digital intermediation that makes it possible for the victim to be both perceived as an aggressive threat, while ultimately just being a regular peaceful person just doing basic job after basic job (while shouldering an extreme amount of long-tail risk!)

(Also there should probably be some age limit / recurring competence examination for firearms, like there should be for driving, or having signature authority on a bank account for that matter. But uh, good luck with that!)
by junaid_97 | 2026-02-08 19:55:02+00:00
I'm building a free alternative to SimpleCitizen (YC S16).

It's a free USCIS form-filling web-app(no Adobe required). USCIS forms still use XFA PDFs, which don’t let you edit in most browsers. Even with Adobe, fields break, and getting the signature is hard.

So I converted the PDF form into modern, browser-friendly web forms - and kept every field 1:1 with the original. You fill the form, submit it, and get the official USCIS PDF filled.

https://fillvisa.com/demo/

I found out simplecitizen offers a DIY plan for $529 (https://www.simplecitizen.com/pricing/)

So, a free (and local-only) version might be a good alternative
by josephg | 2026-02-08 19:55:11+00:00
> IMO systems should be shipped in "Setup Mode" by default with no keys preinstalled. On first boot which ever OS you decide to install should be able to enroll its keys.

I don’t think this works with the security model of secure boot. The secure boot rom is supposed to sit above the OS - as in, it’s more privileged than the OS. A compromise in the OS can’t lead to a compromise in secure boot. (And if it could, why even bother with secure boot in the first place?)

If the OS could enrol whatever keys it wants, then malware could enrol its own malware keys and completely take over the system like that. And if that’s possible then secure boot provides no value.
by christoph123 | 2026-02-08 19:55:29+00:00
A substack for 80/20 life advice and behaviour change.

https://euzoia.substack.com

Full project: https://euzoia.org

Tried to be super low-tech: Notion, super.so, Spotify creators, riverside.

Now thinking of building an email-based agent for behaviour change accountability. Would love any pointers to good UX for email-based AI assistants.
Ask HN: How are you enabling your company to vibe-code?
by tornato7 | 2026-02-08 19:55:47+00:00
I would like to enable non-developer coworkers to vibe code, starting with simple charts but hopefully expanding from there.

I'm trying to develop standardized charting for our company built in JS. This would save a ton of time vs coworkers fiddling with Excel settings every time they need a new chart and looks way better / is interactive.

For devs this is super easy: clone our standard charts repo, drop in your data and tell your preferred coding agent to make a new chart with your data.

However for the marketing team and the like, it's not realistic to get them set up with GitHub / Cursor etc., for many reasons including cost and security concerns.

Realistically just want to get them to visit an internal webpage and see the charts, then be able to drop in files & prompt it for updates. It would run in some locked-down VM so they can't screw up too bad.

I've been brainstorming and testing a few things but don't have a great solution yet.

Anyone with experience here?
by jiggawatts | 2026-02-08 19:56:42+00:00
To me this article is “meta” and tells a very different story: “America is an authoritarian hellhole where trivial matters such as how you lock your phone can put you in real danger. Not from gangs, but from the government.”

I went to the US on holidays recently and several people sat me down before I left to give me a very serious talk warning me about the police being deadly dangerous to anyone that doesn’t behave “just right”. You know: show your hands, don’t reach for things unless prompted, that kind of thing that I just don’t have to worry about over here — where “here” is most of the rest of the Planet.

The last time I felt like this — that I had to worry about the police as a law abiding citizen — was in communist behind the iron curtain.

You’ve all managed to turn the “land of the free” into a copy of the enemy you made fun of.

I guess Trump is right: the US and Russia should be friends. You’re more similar than different.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-08 19:57:11+00:00
Schizochytrium oil with DHA and EPA, which is sold as "algal" omega-3, for a lack of a correct word that could be understood by the general population (Schizochytrium is not an alga), is very good and no fish are killed for it.

Nevertheless, it remains at least 3 times more expensive than a fish oil, e.g. cod liver oil.

Taking daily a decent dose of "algal" oil can be more expensive than the daily protein intake required by a human, if that is taken from cheap sources. Allocating a major part of the budget for food to a supplement taken in minute quantities seems excessive.

I am not aware of any serious reason for the high cost of "algal" oil. A decade ago, it was much more expensive, e.g. 8 times or more in comparison with cod liver oil. Then the price has dropped to 3 times, and then it has diminished no more, remaining at 3 times for 5 years or more.

I believe that it should be possible to further reduce the cost of "algal" oil to make it an acceptable substitute for fish oil, but it seems that the producers are content with their niche market of rich vegans and they do not make any effort to reduce the cost in order to enlarge their market.
by arendtio | 2026-02-08 19:57:15+00:00
> and parrot it back

I don't like this particular phrase, as it suggests that LLMs are just replicating code. As far as I understand, LLMs can also create new code and algorithms (some better than others). When we think of them as copy-paste-maschines, we judge their capabilities unfairly and also underestimate their capabilities.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2026-02-08 19:57:18+00:00
I'm working to figure out new auxetic geometries for 3D lattices. The arrowhead is cool and simple, and gyroids are very effective, but I'm trying to discover if there's something simple, printable, and maximally effective. Tough problem. There's no general theory for auxetic lattices, so it's a matter of reasoning from the desired mechanism to find patterns that fit, almost like alchemical trial-and-error.
by collingreen | 2026-02-08 19:58:23+00:00
This is the most handwaving per paragraph I've ever seen.

I think a fair summarization of your point is "LLM generated programs work well enough often enough to not need more constraints or validation than natural language", whatever that means.

If you take that as a true thing then sure why would you go deeper (eg, I never look at the compiled bytecode my high level languages produce for this exact reason - I'm extremely confident that translation is right to the point of not thinking about it anymore).

Most people who have built, maintained, and debugged software aren't ready to accept the premise that all of this is just handled well by LLMs at this point. Many many folks have lots of first hand experience watching it not be true, even when people are confidently claiming otherwise.

I think if you want to be convincing in this thread you need to go back one step and explain why the LLM code is "good enough" and how you determined that. Otherwise it's just two sides talking totally past each other.
by rsynnott | 2026-02-08 19:58:30+00:00
> But something I'd bet money on is that devs are 10x more productive at using these tools.

If this were true, we should be seeing evidence of it by now, either in vastly increased output by companies (and open source projects, and indie game devs, etc), or in really _dramatic_ job losses.

This is assuming a sensible definition of 'productive'; if you mean 'lines of code' or 'self-assessment', then, eh, maybe, but those aren't useful metrics of productivity.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-02-08 19:58:54+00:00
Clothing is horrible. Shirts don't last a season. T-shirts (all brands) are kleenex. Like tshirts are basically how old scifi portrayed how UBI issued clothes would be. Outdoor gear companies no longer backup their products the failure rate is insanely high while being more expensive. Sony/Apple hugely expensive earbuds are basically disposable junk after a year or two whereas my old Sony headphones lasted decades. No earbuds are going to last decades. Olive oil mayonnaise number 2 and 3 ingredients are other oils (split to two types so that olive oil is TECHNICALLY the highest percentage oil still). Google broke my phones voice command so I can't use it to set timers and I have less functionality than I did 10 years ago (home automations all broke, etc). Music services broke the algos so they no longer give me the 'best results for me' but for the company. New vehicle prices are higher than they have ever been for vehicles with repair costs so high they are going to be an insurance rate nightmare later in their lifecycle.

Other than TVs (which are literally the 1984 screens, where you buy something to spy on you) everything is trash/misleading now.
by aleda145 | 2026-02-08 19:59:09+00:00
https://kavla.dev/

It's an infinite canvas that runs SQL.

I've been working with data my entire career. I feel like we need to alt+tab so much. What if we just put it all on a canvas?

Currently very WIP, but there's a simple titanic demo available!

Built with tldraw and duckdb wasm, running on cloudflare durable objects
by MattRix | 2026-02-08 19:59:15+00:00
You left out the key line “and you don’t believe me, wait six months”. These models are getting better all the time. The term “vibe coding” was only coined a year ago, around the same time as the release of Claude Code.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t think it’s good yet, because it’s brand new tech and it keeps improving.
by n_u | 2026-02-08 19:59:18+00:00
You can also edit it yourself and then ask a friend, relative, or colleague to read the parts you are struggling with improving. "Does this sentence flow? Is there a better way to say this? Is this confusing?"

If you're going to sink time into writing a book, it's worth spending some time editing it so your message gets through clearly. But that's just my opinion, your mileage may vary.
by throw9235837 | 2026-02-08 19:59:39+00:00
It’s very easy to create proxies for any group you hate, just pick something that applies mostly only to that group - or something that haters of that group claim applies to that group and then say you only hate that and not the group.

Jews can be in opposition to the current government of Israel while still recognize when someone is picking specifically on the only Jewish state, and doing so obsessively and irrationally.
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-02-08 20:00:19+00:00
If the thesaurus had an entry for "very useful" (as WordHippo does), then yes, it would work against an actual physical thesaurus book. This whole cluster of words is coded into Wiktionary incorrectly – for example, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/utility#Synonyms is a subsection of "Adjective" despite listing synonyms for a sense of the noun:

> (state of being useful): usefulness, value, advantages, benefit, return, merits, virtue, note

where "note" is a synonym of distinction, not utility, and Thesaurus:utility has fewer entries than this. Versatility should be listed in Thesaurus:utility as a related concept.
by sfbapt | 2026-02-08 20:00:21+00:00
https://sfbapt.com/routes.html

Lots of work left to do, but happy to have a working version up. It's an interactive map that currently shows all the routes and stops for SF Muni, BART, Caltrain, samTrans, and VTA. There are many more agencies (official and unofficial) in the bay, so I'll be adding those throughout the next few days as I sort out the data.

Finding the data and cleaning/normalizing it is a real pain, so if anyone knows a good place to find them (and normalize them), please do share
by NekkoDroid | 2026-02-08 20:00:37+00:00
I was talking about the same "install" that is already done (pre-installed on the drive that is first booted).

Enrolling certs into the UEFI isn't something that needs to be done manually when "Setup Mode" is enabled, the bootloader can automatically enroll them.

This already is a thing with the exception of the ship in "Setup Mode" part. Though some motherboard UEFI implementations are shit (as to be expected) and shit their pants when this happens.

See last paragraph in this section as example: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst...
by colechristensen | 2026-02-08 20:01:21+00:00
With the girls, the rich and powerful, the financial fraud...

Wouldn't immoral foreign intelligence be doing a terrible job if they weren't doing everything they could to become involved in Epstein's world?

Why wouldn't Russia or Mossad be involved? It's almost a cartoon caricature of what a spy agency does. If it was in a movie it wouldn't be believable it's so on the nose.

I think they engineered it from the start, a Jay Gatsby kind of situation – find the right young man and engineer him to be the center of a situation to attract everybody and use the access to who comes to their advantage.

Even if it wasn't from the start idk how incompetent foreign intelligence would have to be to not be involved.
by wat10000 | 2026-02-08 20:01:27+00:00
Lying means to make a statement that you believe to be untrue. LLMs don’t believe things, so they can’t lie.

I haven’t had the pleasure of one of these phone systems yet. I think I’d still be more irritated by a human fake apology because the company is abusing two people for that.

At any rate, I didn’t mean for it to be some sort of contest, more of a lament that modern customer service is a garbage fire in many ways and I dream of forcing the sociopaths who design these systems to suffer their own handiwork.
by Deeqy101 | 2026-02-08 20:01:31+00:00
Hey HN - I kept watching Claude burn 850 tokens on "247 × 18" when a calculator could do it instantly for free. Same with timezone lookups, currency conversion, file listings.

ZeroRules intercepts these deterministic queries BEFORE the API call using regex patterns, then resolves them locally. Not caching (doesn't help fresh queries). Not prompt optimization (still hits the API). Pre-LLM interception.

Patterns: math, timezones, currency, file ops, dates. ~70% token savings on typical workflows. <5ms resolution.

Also built SkillFence (https://cascadeai.dev/skillfence) - runtime monitor for the 341 malicious skills on ClawHub since nobody's watching what skills actually do post-install.

Both free, $9/mo pro. GitHub links on site.

Would love feedback on the pattern-matching approach.
by RicoElectrico | 2026-02-08 20:02:03+00:00
Early 2000s have had numerous kids shows themed around computers and internet. Cyberchase, Crash Zone, Twipsy etc. I always thought the dotcom bubble was the reason behind it. Quite telling then, about how our attitude and expectations towards technology progress, that we don't have any kids shows with an AI theme today. (I don't mean we need one, just that tech is no longer fun, but extractive from the moment it appears in a way that didn't use to be case 15+ years ago - e.g. Google was a different company back then)
by chickensong | 2026-02-08 20:02:14+00:00
I'm not convinced that just because something didn't work 30 years ago, there's no point in revisiting it.

There's likely no perfect solution, only layers and data points. Even if one of the layers only provides a level of trust as high as the most lax person in the network, it's still a signal of something. The internet will continue to evolve and fracture into segments with different requirements IMHO.
by neya | 2026-02-08 20:02:15+00:00
As an engineer, I can never actually let a system write code on behalf of me with the level of complacency I've accumulated over the years. I always have opinionated design decisions, variable naming practices. It's memorable, relatable, repeatable across N projects. Sure, you can argue that you can feed all this into the context, but I've found most models to hallucinate and make things unnecessarily opaque and complex. And then, I eventually have to spend time cleaning up all that mess. OP claims they can tell the model over the phone what to do and it does it. Good for OP, but I've never personally had that level of success with my own product development workflow. It sounds too good to be true if this level of autonomy is even possible today without the AI fucking something up.