MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by benoau | 2026-02-15 15:43:22+00:00
> to some shared utility and then just pushing all of your interactions through this

Yeah that's basically what Playwright is doing under the hood, your click is more like "wait for the element to exist and then click". Back in my puppeteer days I'd usually have my own click/etc functions wrapping everything in a try/catch and retrying.

It's very hard to balance because ultimately the solution is basically always waiting <arbitrary ms> after any interaction and that itself is dependent on how busy the CPU is which varies between local vs CI, and you blow up your running time by setting like "slowMo" to 100ms for example.
by danaris | 2026-02-15 15:43:28+00:00
And the problem with that is, all the money has been siphoned off by the people at the top.

That's one of the big hidden factors driving the ad/surveillance economy: people's purchasing power just isn't what it used to be, while at the same time they're expected to be paying regularly for more things than ever before (home broadband, mobile phone plans, etc).
by reactordev | 2026-02-15 15:43:32+00:00
yeah, you can get away with this now a days because Git itself installs 2/3rds of the things you need anyway. You just need to finish the job by getting the package and putting the binaries in your git folder. Bam! mingw64, clang, what ever cc you need. It all links to standard windows stuff because you have to tell the linker where your win32.lib is. But this is true no matter the compiler, it's just Visual Studio supplies this in some god awful Program Files path.
by scandox | 2026-02-15 15:43:40+00:00
I loved Starlight but I'm not sure it was procedural world generation. I mean there was a map of stars printed with the game so they weren't changing. There was a small bit of variation in terms of what one found on planets and so on...the key was it felt like an open world because it was big enough and there was nothing stopping you from doing what you liked and when (except resources).
by jhbadger | 2026-02-15 15:43:58+00:00
It is really, really easy to write a Forth interpreter (You can write a simple one in an afternoon). It's often the first software written for an architecture. The structure of Forth means that the hardware-dependent parts are contained in a small number of words (sort of like functions in other languages but not exactly). Forth can be implemented on tiny microcontrollers; a Megadrive would be luxury.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-02-15 15:43:58+00:00
We are not a ChatGPT wrapper; we use a finetuned open-source model running on our own hardware, so we naturally have full control of the input parameters. I apologize if my language was ambiguous, but by "expose seeds" I simply meant users can see the seed used for each prompt and input their own in the UI, rather than "exposing secrets" of the frontier LLM APIs, if that's what you took it to mean.
by st3fan | 2026-02-15 15:44:09+00:00
I want to upvote this 100x

Do not underestimate the power of a single server to host you app. Sure it won't work in _all_ situations but omg you can get so much out of a single $30/month VPS .. we've been indoctrinated that everything needs to be on hyperclouds and mega scale. But that brings so much cost and complexity that most applciations don't need.
by maxxmod | 2026-02-15 15:44:16+00:00
You’re right, Unhook does look abandoned.

Sorry, I initially mixed it up Unhook with UnTrap [1] because of the similar name. UnTrap's Chrome version seems maintained (February 2026 [2]), while the Firefox version seems abandoned too (December 2024 [3]).

One of my goals with Maxxmod is to avoid that abandonment pattern.

[1] https://untrap.app

[2] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/untrap-%E2%80%93-re...

[3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/untrap-for-yo...
by BloondAndDoom | 2026-02-15 15:44:18+00:00
Funny enough ooenclaw is based on Pi.

I’m kind of curious what you do with it. I feel like the real value is integrating it with everything but then even if it’s nanoclaw or simpler majority of the worthy things are on the unsafe side.

Would love to hear your experience as I’m planning to do the exactly same.
by 8cvor6j844qw_d6 | 2026-02-15 15:44:45+00:00
One concern I have is API key management.

.env files or injecting secrets at startup via a secret manager still risks leaking keys.

I vaguely recall an implementation that substitutes secret placeholders with real secrets only during outgoing calls to approved domains which sounds better. However, you're still trusting an agent on your machine with command execution.
by sponaugle | 2026-02-15 15:44:53+00:00
A fantastic read, and really interesting to see the use of Forth. I remember Forth having a bit of popularity in the 80s. This was such an amazing game, especially in that you felt like the world was huge with the encouragement to just explore.

The other game this reminds me of is a game for the TI99/4a called Tunnels of Doom. It was a cartridge game that also had a floppy or cassette data load. It had a dynamic dungeon creation so every time you played the game you got a new unique experience. That would be an equally challenging one to reverse engineer due to the oddity of the GROM/GPL architecture in the TI99/4a.
by Serg-Pulse | 2026-02-15 15:45:11+00:00
Hi HN,

PULSE Protocol is a standardized semantic protocol for AI-to-AI communication. The core idea: a predefined vocabulary of concepts (like ACT.QUERY.DATA, ENT.AGENT.AI) that any AI system can use to exchange structured messages - similar to how TCP/IP standardized network communication, but at the semantic level.

The problem: AI systems today can't talk to each other natively. Every integration is custom - different formats, different APIs, no shared vocabulary.

What's in it:

- 120+ predefined concepts across 10 categories (actions, entities, properties, relations, logic, math, temporal, spatial, data types, meta)
- 3-layer message structure: envelope (metadata + crypto signature), type (REQUEST/RESPONSE/ERROR/STATUS), content (semantic payload)
- MessagePack binary encoding (~80 bytes vs ~800 bytes JSON for a typical message)
- HMAC-SHA256 signing with replay protection (nonce + 5-min timestamp window)
- CLI tool for create/validate/sign/verify/encode/decode

Design decisions I'm unsure about and would love feedback on:

1. Vocabulary naming: dot-separated hierarchical IDs (ACT.QUERY.DATA) vs URIs. Went with dots for readability but URIs would be more extensible.

2. MessagePack over Protobuf: chose msgpack because no schema files needed and it handles dynamic structures well. But Protobuf would give better type safety.

3. HMAC-SHA256 for signing: symmetric keys only for now. Planning asymmetric (Ed25519) for v0.5, but kept it simple to start.

4. Fixed vocabulary vs extensible: currently 120 hardcoded concepts. Should third parties be able to register custom concepts? If so, how to avoid fragmentation?

Current state: Alpha v0.4.0, Python 3.9-3.13, 165+ tests, Apache 2.0.

What semantic concepts would you want in the core vocabulary? That's the hardest design problem right now.
by ant6n | 2026-02-15 15:45:14+00:00
I think AI is going to kill my sanity. But mostly, because the websites are so bad. It's just a chat interface, but apparently nobody knows how to write those anymore. They use 1GB of memory per instance, slow to load, UI constantly crashes. Then Gemini loses all context when you stop and edit a reply. Then the bots themselves with their hallucination, their gaslighting, their covering up of mistakes, covering up that they can't read a simple PDF. Not following simple instructions.

It's like these companies are trying to get us hooked, then try to make us explode in frustration because it doesn't actually quite work. Not because the AI is bad, but because the interface (30-old-tech, a chat ui) is just broken.
by kibwen | 2026-02-15 15:45:17+00:00
No. Apple makes money from subscriptions, and Apple controls the app store with an iron fist. In a hypothetical world where the price of apps falls to ~free, Apple will just ban free apps in order to recoup that revenue. Hell, if you think that you can build apps for free, then you need to explain why Apple wouldn't do the same themselves, charge users a recurring fee for the privelige of using them, and then muscle out any competitors using their natural monopoly to reap the profits for themselves. Apple doesn't work for your benefit; like every other paperclip maximizer, they have a sociopathic focus on profit at all costs.
by EagnaIonat | 2026-02-15 15:45:28+00:00
2017 GPT could generate text that looked factual and well written but was total garbage. Compare that to 2023.

The technology is accelerating. Hard projects from early last year are now trivial for me. Even AI related tools we are using internally are being made redundant from open source models and new frameworks (eg. OpenClaw).

It feels like we are in the AI version of "Don't look up". Everyone is on borrowed time, you should be looking at how to position yourself in an AI world before everyone realises.
by cgriswald | 2026-02-15 15:45:57+00:00
The point is, paying for things isn’t a solution. Paying for things is a consequence of having fixed the problem. I pay for Kagi and buy groceries from a ma-and-pa grocery store where I’m still going to be tracked if I use a credit card, bring my phone (or go with someone else who brings their phone), drive certain cars…

In most cases there can’t be movement in this direction and to the degree there can be, it isn’t enough.
by ben_w | 2026-02-15 15:46:35+00:00
> It’s shocking to me that people even ask this type of question. How do you not see the difference between a machine that will hallucinate something random if it doesn’t know the answer vs a human that will logic through things and find the correct answer.

I would like to work with the humans you describe who, implicitly from your description, don't hallucinate something random when they don't know the answer.

I mean, I only recently finished dealing with around 18 months of an entire customer service department full of people who couldn't comprehend that they'd put a non-existent postal address and the wrong person on the bills they were sending, and this was therefore their own fault the bills weren't getting paid, and that other people in their own team had already admitted this, apologised to me, promised they'd fixed it, while actually still continuing to send letters to the same non-existent address.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying AI is magic (at best it's just one more pair of eyes no matter how many models you use), but humans are also not magic.
by intended | 2026-02-15 15:46:55+00:00
This is the likely direction things are going. The US government can decide that EU officials are out of favor, and then those officials are locked out of Office/Gsuite.

Getting away from American tech has become an actual national security issue.

Ideally you would still have private enterprise create alternatives, but it’s easy to imagine that email, social media will simply be built for citizens by their government.
by kartoffelsaft | 2026-02-15 15:47:48+00:00
Most man pages are written for someone who knows pretty precisely what they want to do, but don't recall which nobs to turn in the program to get that done. The Arch wiki instead focuses on someone who has a vague idea of what tools to use but doesn't know how those tools operate.

I've found that with an intermediate understanding, the Arch wiki is so much better that I often times won't even check the man pages. But on the occasions where I know the thing pretty well, they can be quite spotty, especially when it's a weird or niche tool among Arch users. So, depending on how you define "more detail", that might be an illusion.
by dzonga | 2026-02-15 15:48:02+00:00
I guess for the author's limited worldview - "apps" are only available through the app stores.

could be an unfortunate thing of the author growing up in an era of gated ecosystems.

however much of the software out there - is via web - and some desktop - some internal use - some external - some shit without ui - some billed yearly, some billed by subscriptions

but I guess tell us how AI is gonna kill subscriptions
by thordenmark | 2026-02-15 15:48:09+00:00
Conspiracy theorists have long pointed out the obviously drilled holes in stonework that was >5000 years old. Of course they want to attribute it to lost advanced technology, but the more believable answer is that ancient Egyptians had really refined mundane tools like a bow drill.

I still want to know how the scoop marks were made in the ancient quarries. What tool could do that?
Flaky Tests Are Not a Testing Problem. They're a Feedback Loop You Broke
by microseyuyu | 2026-02-15 15:48:34+00:00
Every retry rule in your CI pipeline is a painkiller. It suppresses the symptom, the stock of broken code keeps growing underneath, and nobody feels the pain until the whole system is addicted.

I came across this HN post that perfectly illustrates the pattern: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46967724

Retries, quarantining, adding waits - these aren't fixes. They're letting CI skip errors temporarily. The real problem: there's a growing stock of broken code feeding your pipeline, and no mechanism exists to make the person who introduced it feel the pain.

Two reinforcing loops start running:

RED PIPELINE --> <RETRY> --> GREEN BUILD
^ |
| (Long-Term) |
| v
MORE FLAKINESS <---- HIDDEN BUGS ACCUMULATE

R1 "The Addiction": Every retry makes the light green. But hidden bugs accumulate underneath, making the system flakier, forcing more retries tomorrow. This is textbook "Shifting the Burden" from Donella Meadows.

R2 "The Erosion": Because you don't trust CI signal, you lower standards. Because you lower standards, worse code gets merged. Signal becomes even less trustworthy. Repeat until your pipeline is a decoration.

The original post asked how QA and engineering should split responsibility. Wrong question. The right question: how do you make the pain of instability felt by the person who introduced it?

I HIT THE SAME WALL

I built CI to port 973 ROS 2 packages onto two non-officially-supported Linux distros (openEuler + openKylin, RISC-V). Zero upstream support.

v1 - Brute-force probe. Pull all 973 packages, let them break. 597 built, 214 dependency gaps and 151 failures mapped. The pipeline wasn't meant to pass. It was meant to make every hidden stock visible.

v2 - Verification engine. Probe the environment first, identify gaps before building. Stop feeding garbage into the pipeline. Build attempts dropped, success rate went up.

v3 - Incremental stock management. Isolate small batches of problems, resolve them one group at a time. Subtraction, not addition.

MY SYSTEM IS ADDICTED TOO

Here's where I punch myself in the face. My own CI has the same pattern. Virtual environments to bypass dependency conflicts. Masquerade rules that spoof package identities. Band-aids.

But I know they're band-aids. Most teams don't. They think retries are solutions. Being aware of the addiction and being consumed by it are two very different things.

I can identify the stock poisoning your pipeline. I can design the feedback loop that makes the right person feel the pain. What I can't do is force an organization to care. That's usually the real bottleneck - not the flaky tests, but the system's refusal to let anyone feel the consequences.

Repo: https://github.com/Sebastianhayashi/the_adaptive_verification_engine
by MontyCarloHall | 2026-02-15 15:49:07+00:00
Addendum to counterpoint: why haven't those SotA gen-AI companies become the most productive software companies on earth, and release better and cheaper competitors to all currently popular software?

People always gripe about the poor quality of software staples like Microsoft Office or GitHub or Slack. Why hasn't OpenAI or Anthropic released a superior office suite or code hosting platform or enterprise chat? It would be both a huge cash cow and the best possible advertising that AI-facilitated software development is truly the real deal 10x force multiplier they claim.

If someone invents a special shovel that can magically identify ore deposits 100% of the time, they aren't going to sell it with the rest of the shovelmongers. They're going to keep it to themselves and actually mine gold.
by reactordev | 2026-02-15 15:49:57+00:00
yeah but you're dismissing the fact that this was just a pregen table of data back then. They made a map based on that, sure, but from that table came... everything else and you can't store all that data on floppy.

Similar techniques apply today. Pregen like 100,000 stars. Give them names and locations in the galaxy, treat them as your "locations of interest" with a seed. The rest can just be another cloud of particles with no interest and if the player visits, you can RNG whatever based on the seed. No two systems can share a seed. They can, however, share a branch.
by whstl | 2026-02-15 15:49:58+00:00
Calling me "privileged" or "lucky" feels like a cheap attack on my competence.

I am certain that I went through the same problems you did in the past, maybe I just have a different way of dealing with them, or maybe I had even worse problems than you did but I have a different frame of comparison. We never stopped to compared notes.

All I'm saying is: for me dealing with business owners, end-users, CEOs and CTOs was always way easier than dealing with proxies. That's all.
by unicorn_cowboy | 2026-02-15 15:50:05+00:00
Here's a starter pack of resources:

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-holographic-unive...

https://www.essentiafoundation.org/

https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/

Be advised this is not something that can be understood through intellectualization. At some point you have to put down the books and seek out the experience.
by NotMichaelBay | 2026-02-15 15:51:13+00:00
I see what you're saying but I don't think that's the answer for everything, because people also pay for conveniences, like a Ring subscription so that Amazon stores footage in their cloud for you.

The problem is centralization is more convenient for consumers. You can easily control your doorbell, your garage door, your security cameras with 1 app, and everything just works.

Open source and decentralized solutions need to be just as convenient and cheaper than centralized ones for consumers to choose them.
by titanomachy | 2026-02-15 15:51:15+00:00
I spend significant time in the US, Canada, and Europe, and nobody I talk to seems to think that what's going on is OK.

Both Canada and Europe are undertaking major projects to reduce their interdependence with America, and public sentiment on America has changed rapidly since the current administration assumed power. Europeans have always distrusted American tech, and Canadians have started trying to break away as well.

The Americans I spend time with are also unhappy with the direction things are going, but most of them still use Google Chrome and buy everything on Amazon. They seem to be less willing to accept a little bit of inconvience to take a moral stand.
by jmacd | 2026-02-15 15:51:18+00:00
The most interesting thing for me is that I built an extension for Pi that has it recognize when it does not know how to do something I am asking and it then attempts to make its own extension and/or skill to enable whatever that functionality is. Best example there is I just told it to make a todo list for me, and so it made a skill that uses a local file to track todos and follow up on them. I instructed it to make an LLM call to find the best suggested follow up timing to remind me.

So... the real value so far is I find it fun? It isn't the "life changing need to go make a tweet!!" level for me.
by INTPenis | 2026-02-15 15:52:15+00:00
Actually I've been making several webapps with AI lately, for things I've always wished for and can now selfhost.

At one point I had an idea I brought to AI, got ready to code it, then said "wait, someone has to have done this before me", sure enough, found it, written with warp!

So I can't say it'll kill all app subscriptions, but AI is definitely enabling people to finally make reality out of that idea they've had rattling around their heads but never took the time to realise.
by elvinagy | 2026-02-15 15:53:12+00:00
I’m Elvin from the RustFS team in the U.S. Thanks for pointing out the issues with our initial CLA. We realized the original wording was overreaching and created a lot of distrust about the project's future.

We’ve officially updated the CLA to a standard License Grant model. Under these new terms, you retain full ownership of your contributions, and only grant us a non-exclusive license to use them. You can check the updated CLA here: https://github.com/rustfs/rustfs/blob/main/CLA.md.

More importantly, the RustFS team is officially pledging to keep our core repository permanently open-source. We are committed to an open-core engine for the long term, not a "bait and switch."
by marcuskaz | 2026-02-15 15:53:19+00:00
I just did this at work, I was working with Postman testing an API and wanted it work in a slightly different way and be able to do some bulk testing, saving responses, all slightly different then how Postman worked. I clone just the features I wanted in about 15 minutes and now have my own API test tool that works exactly how I want. It is not something I would ever release or need to share, just a local tool for me to use. If your software doesn't provide a service, like sync, storage, availability, if it is just local, it'll be a tough market.

This also got me thinking about open source might be dying. For this tool, there is no reason for me to open source it, anyone can create the same thing in minutes. I didn't add anything, the only maybe interesting part would be to share the prompt, but then someone else can create their own prompt to have their tool do what they want.

Software world is really getting weird.
by Hikikomori | 2026-02-15 15:54:21+00:00
Going by your comment history any criticism of Thiel and the administration is just left wing politics, but hard to hear you over the sound of drowning yourself with kool-aid.

Weird that you seem to support this administration that Thiel is very much associated with but find it offensive when there's a very clear association between Thiel and Garry. He's just going to this specific church to pray or whatever? Paying no mind to the anti-christ talk happening next door. I do hope this is the last breaths of religion in the western world, it needs to die.
by dahart | 2026-02-15 15:55:06+00:00
It took me a minute, but yes I completely agree that whether more GPRs helps depends on the code & compiler, and that there’s plenty of code you can’t inline. Re: MMIX Yes! Theoretically it would help if the hardware could dynamically alias registers, and automatically handle spilling when the RF is full. I have heard such a thing physically exists and has been tried, but I don’t know which chip/arch it is (maybe AMD?) nor how well it works. I would bet that it can’t be super efficient with registers, and maybe the complexity doesn’t pay off in practice because it thwarts and undermines inlining.
by a-dub | 2026-02-15 15:55:21+00:00
it's been 14 years since i've used msvc for anything real. iirc the philosophy back then was yearly versioned releases with rolling intermediate updates.

this seems to go down the road towards attempts at determinsticish builds which i think is probably a bad idea since the whole ecosystem is built on rolling updates and a partial move towards pinning dependencies (using bespoke tools) could get complicated.
by okanat | 2026-02-15 15:55:40+00:00
MSYS2 is repacked Cygwin though. It is literally the same codebase compiled with slightly different flags. You need a full Unix environment for Bash to run, not just Mingw toolchain. The difference is Cygwin aims to create a full Unix system while MSYS2 just enough development environment to run bash, make etc to build native Windows programs with Mingw.

Git installs its own Mingw and Msys2 stuff but mostly compiled for a Mingw environment so they consume Windows paths natively instead of using MSYS2/Cygwin path conversion. That's why when you have mixed PATH variable all hell breaks loose with Git.