MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vidarh | 2026-02-09 13:14:27+00:00
> My 2 cents: just like Cursor's browser, it seems the AI attempted a really ambitious technical design, generally matching the bells and whistles of a true industrial strength compiler, with SSA optimization passes etc.

Per the article from the person who directed this, the user directed the AI to use SSA form.

> However looking at the assembly, it's clear to me the opt passes do not work, an I suspect it contains large amounts of 'dead code' - where the AI decided to bypass non-functioning modules.

That is quite possibly true, but presumably at least in part reflects the fact that it has been measured on completeness, not performance, and so that is where the compiler has spent time. That doesn't mean it'd necessarily be successful at adding optimisation passes, but we don't really know. I've done some experiments with this (a Ruby ahead-of-time compiler) and while Claude can do reasonably well with assembler now, it's by no means where it's strongest (it is, however, far better at operating gdb than I am...), but it can certainly do some of it.

> So while I don't want to make predictions, but it seems for now, the human-in-the-loop method of coding works much better (and cheaper!) than getting AI to generate a million lines of code on its own.

Yes, it absolutely is, but the point in both cases was to test the limits of what AI can do on their own, and you won't learn anything about that if you let a human intervene.

$20k in tokens to get to a surprisingly working compiler from agents working on their own is at a point where it is hard to assess how much money and time you'd save once considering the cleanup job you'd probably want to do on it before "taking delivery", but had you offered me $20k to write a working C-compiler with multiple backends that needed to be capable of compiling Linux, I'd have laughed at the funny joke.

But more importantly, even if you were prepared to pay me enough, delivering it as fast if writing it by hand would be a different matter. Now, if you factor in the time used to set up the harness, the calculation might be different.

But now that we know models can do this, efforts to make the harnesses easier to set up (for my personal projects, I'm experimenting with agents to automatically figure out suitable harnesses), and to make cleanup passes to review, simplify, and document, could well end up making projects like this far more viable very quickly (at the cost of more tokens, certainly, but even if you double that budget, this would be a bargain for many tasks).

I don't think we're anywhere near taking humans out of the loop for many things, but I do see us gradually moving up the abstraction levels, and caring less about the code at least at early stages and more about the harnesses, including acceptance tests and other quality gates.
by jorvi | 2026-02-09 13:16:08+00:00
> In April 2009 RIPE accepted a policy proposal of January 2006 to assign IPv6 provider-independent IPv6 prefixes. Assignments are taken from the address range 2001:678::/29 and have a minimum size of a /48 prefix.

You can have your own PI bloc and move it between ISPs if you so desire. You effectively own the bloc.
by Ukv | 2026-02-09 13:17:38+00:00
> Why should it be Google's (or Bing's) duty to filter those out?

Google intentionally disguises ads as search results, and even lets advertisers present a fake URL. When the system's purpose is to profit from tricking inattentive users, I think they should take on some liability for the outcome of what they're tricking people into doing.

Not to say that better teaching security isn't also a good idea.
by red75prime | 2026-02-09 13:17:44+00:00
The purpose of this project is not to create a state-of-the-art C compiler on par with projects that represent tens of thousands of developer-years. The goal is to assess the current capabilities of a largely autonomous software-building pipeline: it's not yet limitless, but better than it was. What a shocker.

I’ve had my share of build errors while compiling the Linux kernel for custom targets, so I wouldn’t be so sure that linker errors on x86_64 can’t be fixed with changes to the build script.
by rayiner | 2026-02-09 13:18:01+00:00
> I didn't get meds when I was younger. Now I have top 1% IQ (likely average here on hn), but work as a butcher at a slaughterhouse. My mom didn't want to stigmatise me with a diagnosis

Yeah, get your kids diagnosed and get them medicated if they need to be. Adderall is one of the most well studied medications in the world. Whatever downsides there are pale in comparison to the academic and social downsides of untreated ADHD.
by viraptor | 2026-02-09 13:19:07+00:00
> Give them a call, you're not harassing them.

Before posting this idea online... Maybe, possibly, but personally I still think it's a bad idea.

After posting this on HN - no! If you think it's a good idea, so will other people reading this. (And others have before you) After the post reaches the front page - absolutely no - there's a bunch of socially awkward people already thinking about calling the author and they really should NOT DO THAT.

The author owes us absolutely nothing and if they want to disappear, that's their right. Calling them is demanding their time in a not trivial to ignore way. Just write an email that can be deleted async.
by RugnirViking | 2026-02-09 13:19:18+00:00
are you having trouble with the idea that people might not want what their behavioral profile implies? Right now you clearly seem to be interacting with people posting wrong takes, from your perspective, on hacker news. Would you glad if all the internet reconfigured itself tomorrow such that all you could do was read people being terribly wrong about this particular topic? pages and pages of it. "how happy terminalshort must be" the algorithm thinks, a job well done. Right up until someone is wrong about something else you care about
Show HN: Simulation Studio Inside ArchtSoft
by SougataAS | 2026-02-09 13:19:34+00:00
We just shipped Simulation Studio in ArchtSoft.

It lets you simulate and compare software architectures before writing code — focusing on performance, scalability, resilience, and cloud cost trade-offs.

What it does:
Simulates architecture behavior under different load scenarios
Compares alternative designs side-by-side
Evaluates AWS / Azure / GCP implications early
Surfaces bottlenecks and failure risks before production
Helps reduce redesign cycles and cloud overspend

The goal is simple: move architecture decisions from assumptions to evidence.

This is especially useful for:
Early-stage startups making irreversible infra choices
Architects validating design decisions
Teams are tired of discovering issues only after deployment

Looking for honest feedback from the HN community.
What would you expect from an architecture simulation tool like this?
by tdrz | 2026-02-09 13:19:52+00:00
https://pglite.dev

I'm one of the maintainers of PGlite - PostgreSQL in WASM.

We have lots of updates in the pipeline, just listing some of them:

- making it easier to upgrade PostgreSQL's version

- PostGIS - this is one of our most requested extensions and although we have it running server side (ie node, bun, deno) Chrome is holding us back from releasing it

- multi-connection multiplexing over a single instance

Native library is also on our radar, just needs more time...
by coldtea | 2026-02-09 13:20:05+00:00
>I will never use Homebrew again because I'm still sore that they dropped support for a Mac OS version that I was still using and couldn't upgrade because Apple didn't support my hardware anymore.

How old was it? With macOS "running an old version" is not really a viable or advisable path beyond a certain point. Might be something people want to do, might it a great option to have, but it's not very workable nor supported by Apple and the general ecosystem.

>Any decent project should have a way to install without Homebrew. It's really not necessary.

We don't install homebrew because it's necessary, but because it's convenient. No way in hell I'm gonna install 50+ programs I use one by one using the projects' own installers.

Besides, if "Homebrew dropped support" is an incovenience, "manually look for dozens of individual installers or binaries, make sure dependencies work well together, build when needed, and update all that yourself again manually" is even more of an inconvenience. Not to mention many projects on their own drop support for macOS versions all the time, or offer no binaries or installers.
by Bender | 2026-02-09 13:20:43+00:00
This is an opinion piece to get people arguing. Other topics that activate people are which browser is best, iPhone vs Android, Which operating system..., Darkmode vs. ..., which scripting language..., Rust is best for ... and so on. 4chan-GPT posts this automatically on 4chan from Seychelles to get people arguing to keep the site looking active and it works every single time. El Reg is trolling.
by maxibenner | 2026-02-09 13:20:51+00:00
I finally got to rework my html form forwarder[1]. I realized how cheap SES is and thought I might as well make the service free.

I hope open sourcing it could be a way for me to get some mentorship from more experienced devs as well. Unfortunately, my work doesn't really do code reviews so I feel like I am not improving much on that front.

[1] https://www.simplecontactform.org
by joenot443 | 2026-02-09 13:21:13+00:00
Facebook has become a community hub for me more than anything. Mountain biking, snowmobiling, contracting, VJing - there are lots of groups out there with very real and human discussion. You couldn't pay me to go back to reddit for that stuff.

You're right though, rarely do people post to their own timeline these days. I think it's the 90:9:1 social media stasis playing out.
by tjohnell | 2026-02-09 13:23:09+00:00
https://github.com/tldev/posturr

Posturr is a macOS app that blurs your screen when you slouch. I’ve always had bad posture at my desk, so I wanted to figure out a way to check myself. This idea is not radically new, but the methods by which Posturr reminds, e.g. blurring screen, colored border, is unique and effective.

Recently released to the App Store at:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/posturr-posture-monitor/id6758...
by snorremd | 2026-02-09 13:23:13+00:00
When me and a bunch of friends and acquaintances switched away from Slack a little under a year ago (I think) we looked into Matrix. One of the primary requirements was that even our non-technical friends should be able to use it.

At the time Matrix/Element had recently launched their Matrix 2.0 efforts and I tried setting up the whole stack without resorting to their all in one shell-script meant for non-production use. I did not mind hosting four different servers (Synapse, Matrix Auth Service (MAS), Call, etc), but did find the integration and config job a bit tedious. The main blocker though was the lack of an invite-system in the new Matrix Auth Server. Also the fact that the Element X app uses a new Livekit based call server while other clients/apps use a different approach is also something not great.

We ended up going for Mattermost. One service easily hosted with Docker. One app, and easy invites. While I think federation would be cool, right now Mattermost was a bit simpler to get up and running.

Element seems more focused on enterprise and government contracts than self-hosters. I think this is fine, they need to pay their bills. But Matrix 2.0 for self-hosters might need a better story right now.
by canadiantim | 2026-02-09 13:23:48+00:00
You're wrong about this: "People need to let go of this strange and erroneous idea that humans somehow have this privileged access to the 'real world'. You don't."

People do have a privileged access to the 'real world' compared to, for example, LLMs and any future AI. It's called: Consciousness and it is how we experience and come to know and understand the world. Consciousness is the privileged access that AI will never have.
by koliber | 2026-02-09 13:23:57+00:00
The article is gone, but going off the title here...

If the easy stuff takes up 90% of the time, and the hard stuff 10%, then AI can be helpful. Personally, I can do "the easy stuff" with AI about 3-5x faster. So now I have a lot more free time for the hard stuff.

I don't let the AI near the hard stuff as it often gets confused and I don't save much time. I might still use it as a thought partner, but don't give it access to make changes.

Example: this morning I combined two codebases into one. I wrote both of them and had a good understanding of how everything worked. I had an opinion about some things I wanted to change while combining the two projects. I also had a strong opinion about how I wanted the two projects to interact with each other. I think it would have taken me about 2 workdays to get this done. Instead, with AI tooling, I got it done in 3 or so hours. I fired up another LLM to do the code review, and it found some stuff both I and the other LLM missed. This was valuable as a person developing things solo.

It freed up time for me to post on HN. :)
by SciFiDev | 2026-02-09 13:23:57+00:00
Hey HN, maker here.

Short version: I wanted local voice cloning that worked like a normal Mac app. Not a Gradio interface, not a Conda environment, not a Docker container. A real .app in my Applications folder with no dependencies.

Qwen3-TTS is a genuinely good open model, but using it means setting up Python, and dealing with conflicts every time something updates. Rough on the creative crowd, and they use these tools a lot. I figured if I ported it to MLX and wrapped it in SwiftUI, I could skip all of that.

The interesting technical bit: getting the 1.7B model to run well on 8GB Macs took some work. MLX's unified memory helps, but I still had to be careful about quantization tradeoffs- too aggressive and you lose the natural inflection that makes cloned voices sound real. Wound up with a great 5 bit quant.

Voice cloning needs just 3 seconds of audio. Longer samples (up to ~12 seconds) improve quality, but there are diminishing returns past that. On the iOS version, I'm capping reference audio at 8 seconds to stay within mobile memory constraints.

My favorite two features: Voice design (describe a voice, and it makes it up, usually really well), and voice instruction ("read this as if you're highly skeptical" or "yell this as if you're a bit out of breath"). The Qwen team is competing with state of the art techniques.

Happy to go deep on the MLX port, the quantization choices, or anything else. I'll be here all day.
by throwaway150 | 2026-02-09 13:24:07+00:00
Then you should use proprietary solutions. Open source solutions are written by developers for themselves. They are not writing it for you. They have no reason to write them for you. You are not paying them. It is a labor of love they are doing for themselves.

Yet as a bonus they are offering it to you for free as a gift with the hope that if it doesn't work for you, you can improve it or hire someone you can.

If you only care about consuming open source but not contributing, by all means you should buy proprietary solutions.
by spicyusername | 2026-02-09 13:24:37+00:00
We’ll miss creating something we feel proud of, something true and right and good. We’ll miss the satisfaction of the artist’s signature at the bottom of the oil painting, the GitHub repo saying “I made this.”

I definitely feel this some days.
It used to be that I would nitpick code to death to get it just so, proud of the artistic decisions I made. Not only was it functional, but it was beautiful, crisp, elegant, clever.

Just the right abstractions. Complicated problems reduced to perfectly legible structures, easy to read for newcomers, easy to extend when new problems arise.

Extracting that from an LLM just doesn't produce the same feeling, even when it produces the same results. And they don't reliably produce the same results yet even, just poor imitations, however functional.

On the other hand, when they work, I am empowered to produce code I would have never thought of. I'm empowered to bounce an idea off an oracle that knows all the answers, and can tailor its responses to my exact use case. I'm coming around to finding the joy in that. I have to.
by throwaway2037 | 2026-02-09 13:24:43+00:00
This is a fascinating deep dive into the financial state of affairs in Japan. We often see the quote of Japan has gov't debt that exceeds 200% of their GDP. "For the lulz" asks: When is the crash? No one fully understands how a G7 nation can do it, but this article shares new data on the complexity of the 200+% debt to GDP ratio.

FYI: It is free to sign-up for FT/Alphaville -- the much less formal blog of the Financial Times. Also, you can probably find the link on an archiver site.
by utopiah | 2026-02-09 13:25:21+00:00
> the whole value of a robot vacuum is that... I don't vacuum, the robot does, and when it does so it when I'm not at home.

I agree, that's indeed the value proposition and that's in fact why I got mine... but do you really "just" do that, namely turn it on (or automatically with scheduling) or rather do you

- very it's charged (because sometimes it doesn't actually get right on its station)

- verify its empty or that its bin isn't full

- remove chairs and cables

then and only then start it?

I had just a few couple of "bad" experiences when it got stuck on something just a few centimeters of the floor or (and that one really sucks) cables entangled inside to reconsider how "worry free" letting it roam without supervision was. I don't have pets but if I did the poop smearing videos would also scare me quite a bit.
by draismaa | 2026-02-09 13:25:33+00:00
Clawdbot has been exploding in usage over the past weeks, so we ran a hackday around it at LangWatch and quickly hit a familiar problem: great agent behavior, zero visibility into what was actually happening.

This weekend contributors from LangWatch, Orq, and Red Hat collaborated to add native OpenTelemetry instrumentation to OpenClaw, including support for the OTEL GenAI semantic conventions.

You can now trace agent execution steps, LLM calls, tool usage, and token-level costs in a standard OTEL pipeline instead of custom logging.

Setup guide: https://langwatch.ai/blog/instrumenting-your-openclaw-agent-...

+ PR here: https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/pull/11100

Happy to answer questions about the approach and what’s coming next.
by ben_w | 2026-02-09 13:25:41+00:00
Assuming you mean level 4 or 5:

Impossible to know. We don't know how many surprises need to be resolved until anyone has done it. The possibility space is so wide the company may go bankrupt before it gets there on the higher-difficulty estimates of timescales.

On the short-timescale estimates, the only reason I'm confident Tesla don't already level 4 in an alpha version, is that Musk would've shown off an uncut 54 hour video of it crossing the USA from just south of the Canadian border by Vancouver to Key West in Florida if he'd been able to.
by Forgeties79 | 2026-02-09 13:26:22+00:00
Just because you disagree with me doesn’t mean my argument is “logically flawed.” And as the other commenter said, I never said AI had no value. I have used various AI tools for probably 4 years now.

If you’re going to talk to and about people in such a condescending way then you should at least respond to what was said. At least ask clarifying questions before jumping to the most stark, least charitable interpretation of their point.
by mexicocitinluez | 2026-02-09 13:27:16+00:00
> No projects, unless it's only you working on it, only yourself as the client, and is so rigid in it's scope, it's frankly useless, will have this mythical base.

This is naive. I've been building an EMR in the healthcare space for 5 years now as part of an actual provider. We've incrementally released small chunks when they're ready. The codebase I've built is the most consistent codebase I've ever been a part of.

It's bureaucracy AND government process AND constantly changing priorities and regulations and requirements from insurance providers all wrapped up into one. And as such, we have to take our time.

Go and tell the clinicians currently using it that it's not useful. I'm sure they won't agree.

> Perfectly architected code vs code that does the thing have no real world difference

This just flat out isn't true. Just because YOU haven't experience it (and I think you're quite frankly telling on yourself with this) doesn't mean it doesn't exist at all.

> Because you yourself had to choose between time/opportunity vs your ideals and you chose wrong.

Like I said above, you're telling on yourself. I'm not saying I've never been in this situation, but I am saying that it's not the only way to build software.
by vidarh | 2026-02-09 13:29:07+00:00
> the experimenter was trying to show a different point of what the Internet got (as usually)

All of your points are important, but I think this is the most important one.

Having written compilers, $20k in tokens to get to a foundation for a new compiler with the feature set of this one is a bargain. Now, the $20k excludes the time of to set up the harness, so the total cost would be significantly higher, but still.

The big point here is that the researchers in question demonstrated that a complex task such as this could be achived shockingly cheaply, even when the agents were intentionally forced to work under unrealistically harsh conditions, with instructions to include features (e.g. SSA form) that significantly complicated the task but made the problem closer to producing the foundation for a "proper" compiler rather than a toy compiler, even if the outcome isn't a finished production-ready multi-arch C-compiler.
by ColinEberhardt | 2026-02-09 13:29:11+00:00
> Wow, that's an impressive amount of dedication, but I guess you need that if you want to set a world record

Dedication, mmm, dedication. dDdication, that’s what you need. If you want to be the best, and if you want to beat the rest. Dedication way you need.

Hopefully that means something to Brits of a certain age ;-)
by catapart | 2026-02-09 13:30:08+00:00
hard disagree. conversation is a multiple-person activity. the onus is on the participants to understand one another. it's never on one person or the other to make themselves understood. that framing comes from the useless rich people game called "debate" that pretends to be analogous to argument. it's only helpful in playing that game (and not even in real argument). conveyance and reception onus is irrelevant outside of that game, where the only onus is on participant comprehension.
by Anonyneko | 2026-02-09 13:30:14+00:00
Compared to Telegram, it feels like using a laggy MSN Messenger. The experience, both client and server-wise, just feels very unpolished. It's no single big thing, it's more like death by a thousand cuts.

I was bullish on Matrix because it's so extensible, but in the end I realized that only the default client experience matters as that's the one everyone will be using. And it just isn't there yet. In the end, all the group chats I was in migrated to Discord or Telegram, so I had no more reason to use it...
by jstimpfle | 2026-02-09 13:30:20+00:00
How so?

With regards to Linux kernel implementation, I could map you out a list of sequence points caused in the kernel by above sequential "shell script", proving that no other process could observe d and then a using two subsequent "stat" calls. I could imagine that a single directory listing (getdents) could happen to first visit a and then d, though -- I don't know the internals of that.

With regards to POSIX specification, I don't know the details but anything less than that guarantee would be very a huge robustness problem.