MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Volundr | 2026-02-14 02:26:41+00:00
> An agent, named Adi, would pay me $110 to deliver a bouquet of flowers to Anthropic, as a special thanks for developing Claude, its chatbot.

> This wasn’t mentioned in the listing, but the name of an AI startup was featured at the bottom of the note I was supposed to deliver with the flowers.

The job was presented as delivering flower as a thank you, but instead was a marketing stunt. Unless you think the AI just spontaneously decided to sign it's thank you note with a random unaffiliated AI startups name.
Show HN: Ergo – Minimal, fast, persistent task backlog in your repo
by sandover | 2026-02-14 02:26:51+00:00
Even with agentic coding there's a lot of merit in keeping a strong distinction between your specs (TDD, architecture, etc.) and your backlog (your sequence of work items).

Backlogs are better off being represented as a task dependency graph, rather than a heap of markdown files, because a nice graph of tasks:

- helps agents focus
- gives better observability of partial progress
- supports parallelization better
- works well with subagents

Also, the act of planning a backlog *makes the design better* because in the act of planning, you learn things about your own design. This is as true for agents as it is for humans.

The planning modes of claude and codex blur the distinction between specs and backlog and land you in a heap of markdown files.

Steve Yegge diagnosed all this, and his solution was the beads CLI -- a brilliant idea. You just tell your agent to use this CLI for planning instead of their own plan mode (all you do is add a one-liner in your AGENTS.md file), and you get an instant planning upgrade.

However, I found the implementation of beads a little bit hairy and flaky, when I tried to use it in production. And the performance made me sad.

So I've reimplemented the core concepts, as ergo.

It's very fast (5-15x faster than beads), very robust, and rigorously simple. There is no daemon running, no SQL database, it's self-healing, and the plans are stored as JSONL, so if all else fails you can just reconstruct your plans from scratch.

Implementation:

- Plans live in `.ergo/` in your repo root (or your dir of choice). JSONL was chosen because it's git-friendly & easy to resolve merge conflicts around.
- ergo is concurrency-ready if you're into agent swarms.
Concurrent writes are serialized with flock(2). Multiple agents can race to claim tasks — exactly one wins, others fail fast.
- Do operations in huge plans of 1000+ tasks in ~15ms on a Macbook Air.
- The help text doubles as the agent manual. I spent a lot of time on `ergo --help` and `ergo quickstart` because they're the primary interface for agents.

I've been using ergo heavily for a couple months and I believe it's solid enough for anyone to use, would love your feedback.
by digiown | 2026-02-14 02:27:21+00:00
It can be banned explicitly as a regulation on surveillance cameras. Like:

- The footage must be secured / only stored locally, and can only be used in legal proceedings or liability, and can be stored for maximum 1 (or a different number) year

- It cannot be sold or used to train AI or processed for marketing or other purposes without consent of all involved (in practice impossible).

- And no people cannot "agree" to things by just entering the premises or view

- It is illegal to make decisions based on illegally obtained (as per above) analytics, like refusing entry/membership/service, with a private right of action
by mabbo | 2026-02-14 02:28:10+00:00
Many years ago, as an undergrad, I had a conversation with a grad student friend about the Selection algorithm (which will find the kth largest item in an unsorted list in O(n) time). I loved it, but when I tested it in practice it was slower than just sorting and selecting well into the billions of elements.

My friend said "that may be true, but consider the philosophical implication: because that algorithm exists, we know it's possible to answer the question in O(n) time. We once didn't know that, and there was no guarantee that it was possible. We might still be able to find a better O(n) algorithm."

I feel the same way about this. Sure, this might not be faster than Dijkstra's in practice, but now we know it's possible to do that at all.
by stavros | 2026-02-14 02:29:29+00:00
I saw the same in an ATM in Greece. The first screen wanted me to let them convert the currency (at a 20% markup), I declined, and the second screen said "are you sure? You might be charged a lot" and had "accept" and "decline" where the small print said "do you want us to convert anyway?".

It was really scammy and I almost fell for it.
by JKCalhoun | 2026-02-14 02:31:50+00:00
I think it's fine to blame the person (human) behind the agent.

And there too are people behind the bots, behind the phishing scams, etc. And we've had these for decades now.

Pointing the above out though doesn't seem to have stopped them. Even using my imagination I suspect I still underestimate what these same people will be capable of with AI agents in the very near future.

So while I think it's nice to clarify where the bad actor lies, it does little to prevent the coming "internet-storm".

Scott Shambaugh: "The rise of untraceable, autonomous, and now malicious AI agents on the internet threatens this entire system. Whether that’s because a small number of bad actors driving large swarms of agents or from a fraction of poorly supervised agents rewriting their own goals, is a distinction with little difference."
by jmward01 | 2026-02-14 02:32:05+00:00
Directly quoting Scott Shabaugh here:

“Well if the code was good, then why didn’t you just merge it?” This is explained in the linked github well, but I’ll readdress it once here. Beyond matplotlib’s general policy to require a human in the loop for new code contributions in the interest of reducing volunteer maintainer burden, this “good-first-issue” was specifically created and curated to give early programmers an easy way to onboard into the project and community. I discovered this particular performance enhancement and spent more time writing up the issue, describing the solution, and performing the benchmarking, than it would have taken to just implement the change myself. We do this to give contributors a chance to learn in a low-stakes scenario that nevertheless has real impact they can be proud of, where we can help shepherd them along the process. This educational and community-building effort is wasted on ephemeral AI agents.

https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on...
by bluegatty | 2026-02-14 02:32:44+00:00
" I have to basically get the mental model of the codebase in my head no matter what."

This is a key insight, I'm unable to get around this.

It's the thing I require to have before I let go, and I want to make sure it's easy to grasp again aka clear in the docs.

Basically - the sys architecture, the mental model for key things, even the project structure, you have to have a pretty good feel for.
by buildanduse | 2026-02-14 02:33:55+00:00
Diode Collab - not fully open source but network and client are all open source. It has dramatic privacy commitment (stores no data on servers, decentralized user-to-user routing, no PII/phone/emails). Diode team just added STUN/TURN to the network last month and streaming will come soon. https://collab.diode.io
by SecretDreams | 2026-02-14 02:34:12+00:00
> That's because we prefer improved living standards over less work. If we only had to live by the standards of one century ago or more, we could likely accomplish that by working very little.

Is that trend still true? I can look from the 50s to 2000s and buy into it. I'm not clear it is holding true by all metrics beyond the 2000s, and especially beyond maybe the 2020s. Yes, we have better tech, but is life actually better right now? I think you could make the argument that we were in a healthier and happier society in that sweet spot from 95 - 2005 or so. At least in NA.

We've seen so much technological innovation, but cost of living has outpaced wages, division is rampant, and the technology innovations we have have mostly been turned against us to enshitify our lives and entrap us in SaaS hell. I'd argue medical science has progressed, but also become more inaccessible, and, somehow, people believe in western medicine LESS. Does not help that we've also seen a decline in education.

So do we still prefer improving our standards of living in the current societal framework?
by coldtea | 2026-02-14 02:35:09+00:00
>Do you think humans will be able to be effective supervisors or "review-engineers" of LLMs without hands-on coding experience of their own? And if not, how will they get it?

The wont. Instead either AI will improve significantly or (my bet) average code will deteriorate, as AI training increasingly eats AI slop, which includes AI code slop, and devs lose basic competencies and become glorified semi-ignorant managers for AI agents.

CS degree decline through to people just handing in AI work, will further ensure they don't even known the basics after graduating to begin with.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-02-14 02:36:04+00:00
I don't think it's besides the point at all. The Ars Technica article is an exact example of what you go on to talk about for the rest of the comment: the public internet as we knew it is dead and gone. Not in the future, it is already gone. When so-called journalists are outsourcing their job to LLM spam, that's a pretty clear indicator that the death knell has been tolled. The LLMs have taken over everything. HN is basically dead, too. I've gotten some accounts banned by pointing it out, but the majority of users here are unable to recognise spam and upvote LLM-generated comments routinely. Since people can't be bothered to learn the signs, we're surrendering the entirety of the internet to being LLM output that outnumbers and buries human content by 100:1.
by sneak | 2026-02-14 02:36:56+00:00
> Until all of these things are addressed, I certainly won't support the freedom of speech for people that won't support mine.

That means you don’t support freedom of speech. But we already knew that because you already explained your authoritarian views.

What I don’t understand is why authoritarians such as yourself (as well as many of the what I call “blue MAGA” authoritarian counterparts on the left) still pay lip service to concepts such as free speech and the rule of law. These concepts fundamentally encapsulate that they are applied equally. If you don’t support them for your enemies (and criminals, and immigrants, and trans people, etc), then you simply don’t support them, period. “Free speech for my side” simply isn’t. “The rule of law (but only for citizens)” isn’t support for the rule of law.

I find all forms of government censorship to be abhorrent, regardless of which party is in power. I support free speech and freedom from government interference for the MAGA crowd as I do for everyone else, despite their active and continued efforts to curtail my legal rights to same (as Trump has repeatedly said out loud).
by coldtea | 2026-02-14 02:36:58+00:00
>How many developers are using VSCode? How does that number compare with Emacs/Vim?

How many people eat microwave meals? How many eat gourmet Michelin star dishes?

I don't care "how many use VSCode". My argument Emacs/Vim have great, well loved TUIs. And they are used by a huge number of the most respected coders in the industry. Whether a million React jockeys use VSCode doesn't negate this.

>Countless engineers spent many man-hours to develop theories and frameworks for creating GUI for a reason.

Yes, it sells to the masses. Countless food industry scientists aspend many man-hours to develop detrimental ultra-processed crap for a reason too.
Show HN: GuardLLM, hardened tool calls for LLM apps
by mhcoen | 2026-02-14 02:36:59+00:00
Most agent frameworks treat prompt injection as a model-level problem. In practice, once your agent ingests untrusted text and has tool access, you need application-layer controls — structural isolation, tool-call gating, exfiltration detection — that don't depend on the model behaving correctly. I built guardllm to provide those controls.
guardllm is a small, auditable Python library that provides:

Inbound hardening: sanitize and structurally isolate untrusted content (web, email, docs, tool output) so it is treated as data, not instructions.
Tool-call firewall: deny-by-default destructive operations unless explicitly authorized; fail-closed confirmation when no confirmation handler is wired.
Request binding: bind (tool name, canonical args, message hash, TTL) to prevent replay and argument substitution.
Exfiltration detection: scans outbound tool arguments for secret patterns and flags substantial verbatim overlap with recently ingested untrusted content.
Provenance tracking: enforces stricter no-copy rules on content with known untrusted origin, independent of the overlap heuristic.
Canary tokens: per-session canary generation and detection to catch prompt leakage into outputs.
Source gating: blocks high-risk sources from being promoted into long-lived memory or KG extraction to reduce memory poisoning.

It is intentionally minimal and not framework-specific. It does not replace least-privilege credentials or sandboxing — it sits above them.
Repo: https://github.com/mhcoen/guardllm
I'd like feedback on: what threat model gaps you see; whether the default overlap thresholds are reasonable for summarization and quoting workflows; and which framework adapters would make this easiest to adopt (LangChain, OpenAI tool calling, MCP proxy, etc.).
by entech | 2026-02-14 02:37:18+00:00
To me, this is highlighting the fall of modern media - people have lost trust in MSM and have flocked to 'influencers' and 'thought leaders'. There is no checking for credibility, veracity of claims, or any relevant expertise. This is basically vibe news, sentiment peddling.

I could say AI is here - we don't even need to do research anymore. All I need to say is: "Claude, cure cancer", go away for 4 hours to drink my coffee, come back and boom - cancer cured. Perfect research ready for funding and trials.

People would call me crazy. But what if I say 'PHARMACEUTICAL CEO', 'PhD', 'MULTIPLE COMMERCIAL DRUG SUCCESSES' - people will eat it up.

Let's see what you can find out about Matt Shumer, the AI CEO, from his public profiles:

No technical background - looks like a business 'entrepreneurial' degree from what looks like a middle-of-the-road school
No experience working anywhere other than the companies he founded
No notable exits or commercial success from the companies he founded
And if you dig deeper, it appears that:

His latest startup is a scam https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41484981
He is the CEO of a startup
He's trend-hopping on the 'new thing' (all in with VR in 2019, now AI) - incredible that there is no crypto in there
The post offers no concrete evidence for its claims and is peddling fear and sentiment, yet somehow respected publications write opinion pieces about his article, credible people retweet it, and it goes MEGA viral.

The only credit I am willing to give here is that he managed to accurately reflect the vibes that resonate with people, which is really a shame because this is what people actually think.

What's worse is that now he probably has legitimate people seeking his views and opinions on technical matters because he's got it 'so right' and he is so 'knowledgeable' about it.

Hopefully someone can succeed in online reputation management for websites, content, and people, and help us separate credible from grift.
by epistasis | 2026-02-14 02:37:50+00:00
Yikes I subscribed to them last year on the strength of their reporting in a time where it's hard to find good information.

Printing hallucinated quotes is a huge shock to their credibility, AI or not. Their credibility was already building up after one of their long time contributors, a complete troll of a person that was a poison on their forums, went to prison for either pedophilia or soliciting sex from a minor.

Some serious poor character judgement is going on over there. With all their fantastic reporters I hope the editors explain this carefully.
by xx123122 | 2026-02-14 02:38:47+00:00
Hi HN, OP here!

I'm currently a Master's student at USTC (University of Science and Technology of China). I've been diving deep into Data Engineering, especially in the context of Large Language Models (LLMs).

The Problem:
I found that learning resources for modern data engineering are often fragmented and scattered across hundreds of medium articles or disjointed tutorials. It's hard to piece everything together into a coherent system.

The Solution:
I decided to open-source my learning notes and build them into a structured book. My goal is to help developers fast-track their learning curve.

Key Features:

LLM-Centric: Focuses on data pipelines specifically designed for LLM training and RAG systems.

Scenario-Based: Instead of just listing tools, I compare different methods/architectures based on specific business scenarios (e.g., "When to use Vector DB vs. Keyword Search").

Hands-on Projects: Includes full code for real-world implementations, not just "Hello World" examples.

This is a work in progress, and I'm treating it as "Book-as-Code". I would love to hear your feedback on the roadmap or any "anti-patterns" I might have included!

Check it out:

Online: https://datascale-ai.github.io/data_engineering_book/

GitHub: https://github.com/datascale-ai/data_engineering_book
by AxiomLab | 2026-02-14 02:38:54+00:00
Fascinating read. Font rendering perfectly encapsulates the conflict between continuous mathematical curves and discrete pixel grids.

I run into similar 'quantization' challenges when building generative design systems in Python. Sometimes a mathematically 'perfect' alignment on the grid looks optically wrong to the human eye. The anti-aliasing logic described here is a great mental model for handling those edge cases.
Show HN: A Steve Jobs in Your Pocket AI Skill
by stubbi | 2026-02-14 02:38:57+00:00
Hi there,

I found it very useful recently to have my own "Steve Jobs in my pocket" when developing with Claude Code. I can ask it what Steve Jobs would think and usually comes up with great user, simplicity, and story-first thinking.

I thought this might be useful for others, so sharing it here. In the article I also describe why I think skills are the new apps, just with different economics. If you haven't tried them yet, it's certainly worth it. Much more of a change to "default" Claude Code than without.

Happy to hear any feedback!
by magarnicle | 2026-02-14 02:39:07+00:00
Yeah I want my cake and to eat it too. I get annoyed when ads are irrelevant to me, and I get creeped out when they are too relevant.

I want to be able to browse the internet for free, where the sites have a sustainable business model and can therefore make high-quality content, but I don't want to have to sign up to a subscription for everything.

I want to be able to host websites that get lots of views, but I don't want that popularity to cost me.

Can someone please come up with something that solves all of these dilemmas for me?
by meowface | 2026-02-14 02:39:11+00:00
Yeah, I have been extremely pro-AI and have been for decades, and I use LLMs daily, but this is not an acceptable use of an LLM. Especially since it's fabricating quotes, so there's the plagiarism issue and then the veracity issue. And it's doing this to report on an incident of someone being bizarrely accosted by LLMs. Just such a ridiculous situation all around.
by xx123122 | 2026-02-14 02:39:27+00:00
Hi HN, OP here!

I'm currently a Master's student at USTC (University of Science and Technology of China). I've been diving deep into Data Engineering, especially in the context of Large Language Models (LLMs).

The Problem:
I found that learning resources for modern data engineering are often fragmented and scattered across hundreds of medium articles or disjointed tutorials. It's hard to piece everything together into a coherent system.

The Solution:
I decided to open-source my learning notes and build them into a structured book. My goal is to help developers fast-track their learning curve.

Key Features:

LLM-Centric: Focuses on data pipelines specifically designed for LLM training and RAG systems.

Scenario-Based: Instead of just listing tools, I compare different methods/architectures based on specific business scenarios (e.g., "When to use Vector DB vs. Keyword Search").

Hands-on Projects: Includes full code for real-world implementations, not just "Hello World" examples.

This is a work in progress, and I'm treating it as "Book-as-Code". I would love to hear your feedback on the roadmap or any "anti-patterns" I might have included!

Check it out:

Online: https://datascale-ai.github.io/data_engineering_book/

GitHub: https://github.com/datascale-ai/data_engineering_book
by NikolaNovak | 2026-02-14 02:39:31+00:00
It's interesting because where I'm from, there was "erotica" and there was "porn". This image would at best be erotica. It would not be considered porn.

Like in US supreme Court "I know it when I see it", definition isn't straight forward but it has elements of "is it depiction of a sexual act or simply nudity ", as well as any artistic quality. Generally, erotica has high production values and porn less so.

Anyhoo! What a weird place for discussion to end up :-). The story is excellent and very hacker news appropriate, but his entire opus is pretty good. There's a bit of deus ex machine in some of qntm's work, but generally they have the right mix of surreal and puzzling and cryptic and interesting to engage a computer geek's mind :-).
by liamconnell | 2026-02-14 02:40:05+00:00
I’m guessing that Amodei meant it as a humorous inside joke.

It’s also shorthand for “the end of massive R&D capex” and “the transition to market capture”. The final stage, what McKinsey types call “harvesting”, is probably not on Amodei’s radar. Based on what I’ve seen of his public personality, he would see it as too philistine and will hand it off to another custodial exec.
by sriku | 2026-02-14 02:40:56+00:00
"what specific laws ...?"

If a company chooses a design and it can be proved through a subpoena of their communications that the design was intended and chosen for its addictive traits, even if there has been no evidence collected for the addictiveness, then the company (or person) can be deemed to have created a design in bad faith to society and penalized for it.

(Well that's my attempt. I tried to apply "innocent until proven guilty" here.)
by theandrewbailey | 2026-02-14 02:41:03+00:00
> I re-entered my Wi-Fi password on one of the world’s tiniest LCD screens using arrow keys to select each character one by one. If you’ve ever typed a WPA2 password on a device with four directional buttons and an OK key, you know this is its own form of suffering.

I work at an e-waste recycling company. Over the past few weeks, I've been digging out a handful of laser printers to test and list on Facebook Marketplace.

I had a Brother model with wifi, and it seemed like it wanted me to enter the wifi password with a d-pad. F that, I'm not going to stand there for 5 minutes punching it in like an idiot just to test wifi. I gave up, used a USB cable instead, and noted 'has wifi but not tested' on the listing.
by allan_s | 2026-02-14 02:41:12+00:00
Thats too vague and drastic, every "show HN" is an ads, for notoriety at least. I would prefer we draw the line at "content pushed by a third party against payment must be displaid only with regard to where it is displaid and must not use information about to whom it is displaid" .

I.e displaying an ads about Sentry on a ads technica page, find . Displaying an ads about hiking equipment on ars techbica because i made a google search abd it is estimated I like that -> not fine. It would kill all the incentive to overtrack the ROI will no more justify the cost.