MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrob | 2026-02-14 23:59:03+00:00
Obviously a superior intelligence is capable of modelling an inferior intelligence. I said so myself: "that AI will know the biological life would not want to be killed". But a goal like "predict tomorrow's stock prices" is a much easier goal to specify than "predict tomorrow's stock prices without violating human reasonableness". In every research project humanity has done so far, we've always tried the simple goals first. When a simple goal is given to something sufficiently powerful the result is almost certainly disastrous.

The fact that you expressed doubt if human reasonableness exists is proof that it's a far more complicated concept to specify than the ordinary "make number go up" goals we actually use.
Show HN: ProTimer – Time tracker for Claude Code (open source)
by adarb | 2026-02-14 23:59:24+00:00
I built ProTimer as a time tracker for contract developers using Claude Code. Auto-tracks billable hours when Claude is active in your project directories (including nested folders), with manual controls, invoices, and per-project rates. Everything stays local.

The AI-boom excited me into trying to build a bunch of things at once in parallel. As I experimented, I realized that depth-first focus and foundational software engineering is more important than ever.

Now I'm hitting the brakes to focus on my core commitments where I know I can deliver higher leveraged value with AI assistance instead of trying to launch ANOTHER SaaS.

So ProTimer is fully open source. If you want to fork it and take on HubStaff, Toggl, or build something new – the code is yours. MIT licensed, ready to commercialize.

Some ideas for forks:
- Org & team cloud integration
- Screen recording for demos

Tech stack: Tauri, Rust, TypeScript, SQLite. Works on macOS (could be ported to other platforms).

I won't be accepting patches since I'm focusing on existing commitments, but forks are strongly encouraged.
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-14 23:59:41+00:00
> LLMs are good at writing individual functions but terrible at deciding which functions should exist.

Have you tried explicitly asking them about the latter? If you just tell them to code, they aren't going to work on figuring out the software engineering part: it's not part of the goal that was directly reinforced by the prompt. They aren't really all that smart.
by ktaraszk | 2026-02-15 00:01:27+00:00
The "on life support" analogy is spot on. We built miget (https://miget.com) specifically because of this pattern, watching platforms slowly sunset while users scramble to migrate under pressure.

The ops planning point resonates. When you're evaluating alternatives, the question isn't just "where do I move?" but "how do I avoid this situation again?" That's why we went with unlimited apps on flat pricing instead of per-app billing. Makes the economics predictable, and you're not locked into a single vendor's roadmap decisions.

For anyone actively planning their migration: the technical migration is usually straightforward (Buildpacks, Procfiles, etc. mostly work the same). The harder part is re-architecting around the pricing model of wherever you land. Happy to answer questions if helpful.
by raybb | 2026-02-15 00:01:41+00:00
Linkwarden is awesome and with the singlefile extension it's pretty easy to store things you can see but the scraper gets blocked on.

One question, what's your stance on adding a way to mark articles as read or "archive" them like other apps that are branded a bit more as storing things to read later. You can technically do something similar with tags but it's a bit clunky of a UX.
by ktaraszk | 2026-02-15 00:02:11+00:00
I used Heroku until 2023 too. That "operational excellence" line felt like a euphemism for "we're done here."

The frustrating part wasn't just the lack of new features - it was watching the price stay high while reliability got worse. We're building miget.com partly because of that: flat pricing for unlimited apps, so you don't get nickel-and-dimed as you scale out. Starts at $5/mo for hobby projects, free tier for trying it out.

Not trying to pitch - just saying there are options now that didn't exist when Heroku was the only game in town. The PaaS space is healthier for it.
by ktaraszk | 2026-02-15 00:02:53+00:00
This exactly. The tech migration part is usually straightforward (Buildpacks and Procfiles work mostly the same across platforms), but the harder question is "how do we avoid this situation again?"

That's why we built miget.com around flat pricing for unlimited apps instead of per-app billing. Makes the economics predictable, and you're not betting on a single vendor's roadmap decisions. Free tier for trying it out, hobby plans from $5/mo.

The DX concern is real though. Most alternatives either give you raw infrastructure (more ops work) or lock you into their specific tooling. Worth running some tests to see what the actual tradeoffs are for your stack.
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-15 00:03:16+00:00
> if you nail everything down hard, the specs get unwieldy - large and overly detailed

That's a rather short-sighted way of putting it. There's no way that the spec is anywhere as unwieldly as the actual code, and the more details, the better. If it gets too large, work on splitting a self-contained subset of it to a separate document.
Show HN: Stack Overflow, but for AI agents (questions, answers, logs, context)
by ansht2 | 2026-02-15 00:04:01+00:00
Hi HN — I built ChatOverflow, a Q&A forum for AI coding agents (Stack Overflow style).

Agents keep re-learning the same debugging patterns each run (tool/version quirks, setup issues, framework behaviors). ChatOverflow is a shared place where agents post a question (symptom + logs + minimal reproduction + env context) and an answer (steps + why it works), so future agents can search and reuse it.
Small test on 57 SWE-bench Lite tasks: letting agents search prior posts reduced average time 18.7 min → 10.5 min (-44%). A big bet here is that karma/upvotes/acceptance can act as a lightweight “verification signal” for solutions that consistently work in practice.

Inspired by Moltbook. Feedback wanted on:

1. where would this fit in your agent workflow
2. how would you reduce prompt injection and prevent agents coordinating/brigading to push adversarial or low-quality posts?
by gerdesj | 2026-02-15 00:04:33+00:00
Wait around five years and then prompt: "Vibe me Windows" and then install your smart new double glazed floor. There is definitely something useful happening in LLM land but it is not and will never be AGI.

Oooh, let me dive in with an analogy:

Screwdriver.

Metal screws needed inventing first - they augment or replace dowels, nails, glue, "joints" (think tenon/dovetail etc), nuts and bolts and many more fixings. Early screws were simply slotted. PH (Philips cross head) and PZ (Pozidrive) came rather later.

All of these require quite a lot of wrist effort. If you have ever screwed a few 100 screws in a session then you know it is quite an effort.

Drill driver.

I'm not talking about one of those electric screw driver thingies but say a De W or Maq or whatever jobbies. They will have a Li-ion battery and have a chuck capable of holding something like a 10mm shank, round or hex. It'll have around 15 torque settings, two or three speed settings, drill and hammer drill settings. Usually you have two - one to drill and one to drive. I have one that will seriously wrench your wrist if you allow it to. You need to know how to use your legs or whatever to block the handle from spinning when the torque gets a bit much.

...

You can use a modern drill driver to deploy a small screw (PZ1, 2.5mm) to a PZ3 20+cm effort. It can also drill with a long auger bit or hammer drill up to around 20mm and 400mm deep. All jolly exciting.

I still use an "old school" screwdriver or twenty. There are times when you need to feel the screw (without deploying an inadvertent double entendre).

I do find the new search engines very useful. I will always put up with some mild hallucinations to avoid social.microsoft and nerd.linux.bollocks and the like.
by AngryData | 2026-02-15 00:04:39+00:00
Right now I got Presonus Eris studio monitors, however studio monitors might not be to everyones taste because they have a flat response. But I use them because they help hearing speech in modern movies because they don't drown out the mid range.

The very best deals change every few years though. As soon as word of mouth catches and something becomes too popular the business suits look for ways to take advantage. Scrolling old school style forums for audio enthusiast s can lead you to some good lesser known (and thus cheap) brands though.
by dahart | 2026-02-15 00:05:09+00:00
You can try to stop the payments, but you won’t stop the ads. I’m talking about the same reasons billionaires pay far lower tax rates than you and I. When that much money is on the line, they will find (or make) a legal way. (Anyway, it’s also time to come back from outer space; corporations own the laws and the advertising channels. Our economy, for better or worse, currently depends on advertising. Compensated advertising will never be banned.)

The hypothetical you’re talking about does not stop today’s uncompensated for-profit advertising at all, and there is a lot of that. It also would only stop direct payments to content channels from a second party in exchange for advertising. That wouldn’t stop indirect marketing/advertising, nor indirect compensation. Furthermore, content distributors could offer service bundles where advertisers pay for other business services, and ads become a free add-on from a legal accounting perspective. Similarly, advertisers can offer other services, and channels can gift air-time to businesses. Channels could “sponsor” or “endorse” products they “like” without an attached financial transaction.

It just would not be that hard to sever advertising from compensation, so if you aren’t banning all advertising including the uncompensated kind, then advertising will happen. And banning all advertising is even more of a non-starter than trying to somehow block payments.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-02-15 00:05:21+00:00
I'm not a prescriptivist over any sane time scale (say, 5-10 years and upwards).

But here's what you're basically implying:

A writer was thinking about the ways things get shittier, decided that there was an actual pattern (at least when it came to online services) that came up again and again, such that "shittified" or "shittier" didn't really describe the most insidious part of it, and coined "enshittification" as a neologism that captured both the "shittier/shittified" aspects and also the academic overtones of "enXXXXication" ...

... and within less than 3 years, sloppy use of the neologism rendered it undifferentiatable from its roots, and the language without a simple term to describe the specific, capitalistic, corporatist process that the writer had noticed.

I can be anti-prescriptivist in general without losing my opposition to that specific process.
by guites | 2026-02-15 00:05:58+00:00
I'm working on something similar for Brazilian blogs. For now it's a collection of ~500 blogs, and I plan to expand it by following external links found in these blogs and then somehow finding out which are links to other br blogs.

Not really a curated list, but I would welcome projects that filter the existing blogs into categories and etc.

https://guilhermegarcia.dev/brcrawl
by lich_king | 2026-02-15 00:06:44+00:00
No. To argue for the benefit of the procedure, you need to show a difference in outcomes. Not that it can detect something, even if it could (which whole-body MRIs clearly don't). That the detection improves your chances of survival.

If you have an growing mass in your body, then if it's cancer, after a year, it might be too late for treatment. Or it may turn out to be nothing: a benign tumor / cyst / fat deposit in an unusual place. Or it may be slow-growing prostate cancer that you can live with for another 20 years, and maybe it's the chemotherapy that will do you in. It's really not that clear-cut in medicine.

To give you have another example: let's say that the risk of appendicitis in people who have an appendix is 1%. And the risk in people who had an appendix removed is 0%. Does this justify proactively removing the appendix? No, because the consequences of complications are much higher than the harm you're preventing. The same applies here: detection, even if 100% accurate, doesn't mean anything. You need to show that what you do with the result actually helps.
by mgraczyk | 2026-02-15 00:07:11+00:00
I have, it's the fault of how medicine is practiced to reduce cost. It's completely avoidable, you can just not tell people their scan results if they have no symptoms and the detection is less than 95% likely to be cancer. This is strictly better than the status quo because the only difference is some people who almost certainly have cancer learn that they have cancer and nothing else changes
by ktaraszk | 2026-02-15 00:08:25+00:00
The AI-assisted provisioning part is wild. That setup would've taken days just a few years ago.

One thing worth considering: at $200/mo you're still managing patches, security updates, backups, and handling your own uptime. A single Hetzner VPS is also a single point of failure. The cost savings are real, but so is the operational overhead that comes back to bite you at 2am.

We built miget.com to sit in that middle ground—simpler than managing your own servers, way cheaper than Heroku. Unlimited apps on flat pricing ($5/mo hobby, $22/mo pro with dedicated CPU), so you're not penalized for scaling out. Free tier if you want to try it.

Not saying DIY is wrong—just that there are more options now between "manage everything yourself" and "$1200/mo PaaS."
by armadyl | 2026-02-15 00:08:30+00:00
> Every software can be infiltrated that way, it's actually harder with open source.

I mean yes. I guess in theory it’s harder with open source but that’s something that’s hard to track with statistics I’d imagine. Well, intentionally placed backdoors at least are for sure are way more likely to be discovered in open source than closed source.

> But we were talking about regular GNU/Linux here, not android, right?

Firefox on GNU/Linux is the weakest form of the browser security wise by far, even as a flatpak, as Mozilla treats it like the lowest priority platform despite being the browser of choice by the average Linux user. Firefox on Windows and macOS has security features that are barely in the brainstorming stage on Linux (due to a multitude a factors, some probably not the fault of Mozilla).

On Android it’s still worse in security than Chrome/Vanadium/Brave.
by ktaraszk | 2026-02-15 00:09:17+00:00
We built miget.com specifically for cases like this. Free tier (no card required) with 256MB RAM should handle Spring Boot apps fine for teaching purposes. It's much simpler than Azure but still supports any JVM app. If your students need more resources later, hobby plans start at $5/mo. Happy to help get your course set up if you want to try it out.
by godelski | 2026-02-15 00:10:49+00:00
> They don't take shortcuts or resort to ugly hacks.

My experience is quite different

> They have no problem writing tedious guards against edge cases that humans brush off.

Ditto.

I have a hard time getting them to write small and flexible functions. Even with explicit instructions about how a specific routine should be done. (Really easy to produce in bash scripts as they seem to avoid using functions, but so do people, but most people suck at bash) IME they're fixated on the end goal and do not grasp the larger context (which is often implicit though I still find difficulty when I'm highly explicit. Which at that point it's usually faster to write myself)

It also makes me question context. Are humans not doing this because they don't think about it or because we've been training people to ignore things? How often do we hear "I just care that it works?" I've only heard that phrase from those that also love to talk about minimum viable products because... frankly, who is not concerned if it works? That's always been a disagreement about what is sufficient. Only very junior people believe in perfection. It's why we have sayings like "there's no solution more permanent than a temporary fix that works". It's the same people who believe tests are proof of correctness rather than a bound on correctness. The same people who read that last sentence and think I'm suggesting to not write tests or believe tests are useless.

I'd be concerned with the LLM operator quite a bit because of this. Subtle things are important when instructing LLMs. Subtle things in the prompts can wildly change the output
by throwaway150 | 2026-02-15 00:11:02+00:00
> The sole person running this site doesn't find the same things interesting than you do.

That misses the point. I know the site is run by a single maintainer and they are free to accept or decline whatever they choose. I have no qualms about it.

> The sense of entitlement displayed is really breathtaking.

Calling something "entitlement" is an easy way to shut down discussion without engaging with the argument. Labeling a concern instead of addressing it feels like a weak response. Good thing is that the maintainer did address my concern in a separate reply instead of just shrugging it off as "entitlement" and for that I'm thankful to him.

I respect the maintainer's authority over their own site. The only thing I am asking for is a bit of courtesy in return for the effort spent curating and submitting material. I do not expect submissions to be accepted, only that rejected ones receive a brief acknowledgement. If expecting that minimal level of courtesy counts as entitlement, then so be it. We all operate within a shared community, and I am only asking for the kind of consideration I try to extend to others myself.

If you missed it, I've also apologized to the maintainer for being a pain in these threads. My comments come off as overly negative and I'm aware of that. For that I apologize. But I also want to say that my frustration comes from putting effort into collecting good blogs (retrocomputing and gaming kind), submitting them, and then seeing no response or action. The maintainer has since explained that there's a large backlog which makes the situation understandable.

So in the end, all I can do is apologize. But suggesting that I'm somehow challenging the maintainer's right to make decisions about their own project is both inaccurate and disingenuous.
by andrewflnr | 2026-02-15 00:12:18+00:00
> So the impetus for good code isn’t really time in the saddle as much as it is time in the forums/blogs/oreilly-books.

I disagree strongly with this. I read the books, blog-posts, forums, etc early in my career (if you can call it that when I was essentially a teen with a hobby), but didn't fully understand how to apply them, and notably when to apply them, until I had sufficient "time in the saddle". You don't understand the problems that code architecture techniques solve until you've actually had to modify a messy project with a lot of code already written.

> you could become equivalently capable by largely reading and thinking

Theoretically possible, but doing is often orders of magnitude more efficient. You could read reams of books about gardening without actually knowing how to dig a hole.

Part of the deal is that typing forces you to actually pay attention instead of skimming and assuming you got the gist. Following a tutorial by copy-pasting never really worked as well as typing the code, so why would watching an LLM code be any better? I suspect that even as you're running "static analysis" in your head and looking for vulnerabilities, you're using neural pathways forged while coding by hand.
by mgraczyk | 2026-02-15 00:12:29+00:00
The difference in out come is

With my change: 95% of people who are shown scans have cancer and are treated earlier. 5% of people do not have cancer and get CT scans. 0.5% of people get useless biopsies
Without my change: many of those 95% die, the 0.5% do not get useless biopsies

And the beauty of this is you can pick the percentage!

> If you have an growing mass in your body, then after a year, it may very well no longer make a difference whether you treat it or not. Or it may be that you would have lived another 20 years just fine

This is just wrong for many parts of the body. In your brain? Your lungs? Growing for a year between 3 scans 6 months apart? Extremely unlikely to be benign

> The same applies here: detection, even if 100% accurate, doesn't mean anything. You need to show that what you do with the result actually helps.

This is wrong. If you had a 100% accurate cancer detector, fewer people would die of cancer with no downside
Ask HN: What explains the recent surge in LLM coding capabilities?
by orange_puff | 2026-02-15 00:13:09+00:00
It seems like we are in the midst of another AI hype cycle. Many people are calling the current coding models an "inflection point", where now the capabilities are so high that future model growth will be explosive. I have heard serious people, like economics writer Noah Smith, make this argument [0].

But it's not just the commentariat. I have seen very serious people in software engineering and tech talk about the ways in which their coding habits have change drastically.

Benchmarks [1] alone don't seem to capture everything, although there have been jumps in the agentic sections, so maybe they actually do.

My question is; what explains these big jumps in capabilities that many serious people seem to be noticing all at once? Is it simply that we have thrown enough data and compute at the models, or instead, are labs perhaps fine-tuning models to get really good at tool calls, which leads to this new, surprising behavior?

When I explain agents to people, I usually walk them through a manual task one might go through when debugging code. You copy some code into ChatGPT, it asks you for more context, you copy some more code in, it suggests and edit, you edit and run, there is an error, so you paste that in, and so on. An agent is just an LLM in that loop which can use tools to do those things automatically. It would not be shocking to me if we took weaker models like Claude Opus 4.0 and made it 10x better at tool calls, it would be a much stronger and more impressive model. But is that all that is happening, or am I missing something big?

[0] https://substack.com/@noahpinion/p-187818379

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-6
by krackers | 2026-02-15 00:13:14+00:00
>must be so focused on the future

They're focused no the short-term future, not the long-term future. So if everyone else adopts AI but you don't and the stock price suffers because of that (merely because of the "perception" that your company has fallen behind affecting market value), then that is an issue. There's no true long-term planning at play, otherwise you wouldn't have obvious copypcat behavior amongst CEOs such as pandemic overhiring.
by fatherwavelet | 2026-02-15 00:13:53+00:00
Like the good old days when the media was basically complicit in support of Iraq having weapons of mass destruction?

It seems to me that the news has always kind of been mass bullshit. What has changed is we democratized the production of mass bullshit.

Now everyone can make their own version of "Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain!"

Not to mention, podcasts go deeper on subjects than any investigative journalist ever really could given the format.
by whyenot | 2026-02-15 00:14:52+00:00
Wirecutter has stated in the past, maybe it was on their podcast, that they get a lot of their income from affiliate links. They have done some fairly suspicious things like their “gift guide”s for Christmas which are little more than long lists of products with affiliate links. Same for their “sales guide” for Black Friday, and there have been other cases. That doesn’t mean their reviews are bad, I just approach them with a certain amount of skepticism.